Paul Newman (Cool Hand Luke), Steve McQueen

Cool Hand Luke, directed by Stuart Rosenberg in 1967, is maybe the most iconic role of Paul Newman as Lucas Jackson, a veteran of World War II. Luke has just committed a petty crime and is subsequently sentenced to the brutal punishment of a prison chain gang in the oppressive rural regions of Central Florida. The danger that Luke poses—one could argue like Jesus did returning to Nazareth—is that he sees completely through the game. He sees that the whole established order is built upon the absurd notion that human beings are enslaved by some kind of paternally malignant "God", and that taking this position allows humans to rationalize their exploitation, control, and destruction of other human beings. According to Albert Camus, the world is not in itself absurd; life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between human beings and the world they inhabit. 

Maybe the central theme of Cool Hand Luke is the cruelty of man’s will for power over his fellow man. In the attempt to gain power, one must not only mislead others into “Laws of God and Nature”, but he must also lie to himself for misleading the rest. The chains the prisoners wear are symbolic of the chains that our civilization itself puts on the individual. "Everywhere man is born free and everywhere he is in chains," as the French philosopher Rousseau put it. He also says in his political treatise, The Social Contract, “Show me where I wrote my signature on the contract agreeing to accept the laws and dictates of my fellow man”. Luke is an enigma at first to the powers that be, after destroying municipal property, a rather ridiculous crime. “Ripping the heads off parking meters”, Luke tells the Captain, who replies, “We never had one of those before.” The Captain becomes even more puzzled when he reads Luke’s war record, where he was decorated with medals. Even the prisoners have a pecking order, with Dragline (played in an academy-award winning performance by George Kennedy) is top dog on the chain. “You don’t have a name until Dragline gives you one”, another inmate (ironically named ‘Society’) tells the new inmate.

Luke is on a collision course with the established order, first with Dragline, who beats him mercilessly in the Saturday boxing ring made for inmates to settle grudges. Luke is a man whose nature is to be free and he can not change that fact, and he keeps rising with every punch. “You will have to kill me”, he tells Dragline, and consequently earns the respect of the inmates but raises the radar of the bosses, who intuitively understand that Luke is an existential threat to their authority by making that declaration. When Luke answers the punitive measures of the Captain with sarcasm and is cane-whipped, the Captain (Strother Martin) replies with one of the most famous movie quotes of all time: “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. That line struck a chord in America, especially at a time when the gap between generations was growing and the traditional structure of society was unraveling. The line signified, on a deeper level, the alienation of man (and woman) from one another. Here in Cool Hand Luke these are all men (prisoners and guards alike) who are mimicking a game on the micro level that is also being played on the macro societal level.

Luke is the only one who can see that Western civilization became fundamentally absurd the moment that atomic bombs were thrown on other human beings. Robert Oppenheimer, chief engineer on The Manhattan Project once remarked after completing his task, "it's perfectly obvious that the entire world is going to Hell, and the only way we can possibly prevent this is by doing nothing." It is no accident that the emergence of existentialism coincided with the end of the second great world tragedy, just as in the visual arts the surrealist and dada movement came out of the first world tragedy. How can man do such unspeakable crimes to man? What is it that drives man to throw out rationality and reason, not to mention the emotional empathy and compassion, for the sake of murder? These are not easy questions to answer. Philosophy and psychology are fields of study which can explore the reasons, but if they are honest in their practicality, they recognize their impotence in finding a solution to the question of “why?” I think it is only art, the field that seeks to find answers through the negation of that which has been rigidly structured into binded patterns of the mind, that can break open the hard shell of the absurd state of existence in which we find ourselves. 

Paul Newman as Luke is the Everyman. Like Jake Gittes in Chinatown battling the entire bureaucracy of Los Angeles, Luke is engaged in a losing fight. As isolated as Christ, he must ultimately be sacrificed. It is clear that Rosenberg has purposely chosen the Christ motif to affirm this point. Luke lies prostrate with his arms stretched as if on a cross when he accomplishes the impossible (“No one can eat 50 eggs”), and the scene where he tells the others to “stop feeding off me!” is reminiscent of Christ in the Garden of Gethsmane, Christ already in spirit moving beyond the body. The final frame pans away from the road where the inmates are sharing tales of their savior, and the roads from which they toil form a cross. Although the other inmates are incapable of the courage to be so free in spirit, they are redeemed by the example of Luke. Even his prison number (37) is a reference to a higher spiritual cause. Luke 1:37: “For with God nothing shall be impossible." Luke the Existentialist is pointing this out to all of us. The philosopher Alan Watts (author of Myth & Ritual in Christianity) remarked: "I have often contemplated the stars in the heavens and wondered if at one time they were also planets which became self-aware and in an atomic blaze of glory blew themselves up, spewing debris into the fields around them which eventually formed new planets, and so the game goes throughout this particular universe. The secret of life is knowing when to stop." 

At Paul Newman’s forty-fourth birthday party—held at his Benedict Canyon house—Robert Stone (author of A Hall of Mirrors/WUSA) and his wife Janice (Mattson) met Anthony Perkins, Cloris Leachman, and Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairstylist who would be murdered by the Manson Family in the doomed house on Cielo Drive, in August 1969. The WUSA's producer John Foreman introduced Janice as a character from Stone’s novel and script—“the real Geraldine.” Maybe Foreman was stoned at the time. Robert and Janice Stone were surprised that dope-smoking was as prevalent in Hollywood as in other places they’d recently been, though Newman and Woodward didn’t indulge in it. Newman had a pool table in his home, where he also liked to cook for guests; he taught Janice how to eat an artichoke leaf by leaf.

As for the lifting of conventional constraints on the movie business, Stone’s feelings were mixed, more on the negative side. “I thought liberation from the failing grip of the censors did not seem to be making pictures any better. In fact, it seemed increasingly permissible to trivialize on a more complex level, and to employ obviousness in treating stories whose point was their ambiguity.” That was a bad augury for Stone’s film adaptation of A Hall of Mirrors. Stone’s first conversations with the director Stuart Rosenberg were enough to let him know “that we had very little in common in terms of the stories we wanted to tell.” Janice also mistrusted Rosenberg and she even thought his recent picture with Newman, the iconic Cool Hand Luke, had been a failure, at odds with the audience that shelled out $16 millions. 

The critic Pauline Kael, in her review of Slapshot, asserted: "Paul Newman is an actor-star in the way that Bogart was. His range isn't enormous; he can't do classics, any more than Bogart could. But when a role is right for him, he's peerless." Although I'm not sold on her Bogart-Newman analogy, I tend to accept that Newman defined a sort of damaged masculinity far better than the fellow actors of his time. “Nobody should be asked not to like Paul Newman,” Kael suggested. The director John Huston went further, calling Newman “a moral and ethical man. Superb in every way.” And many would agree.

Along with Paul Newman and Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen was the biggest of the young male movie stars of the sixties. The UK had its share of exciting young leading men like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, and Terence Stamp, but of the young sexy guys in America—that were also genuine movie stars—we had Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Warren Beatty. On the next level down: James Garner, James Coburn, and George Peppard. James Garner was actually popular enough to get scripts from time to time that weren’t covered by the top three, but not often. Once McQueen became a movie star with The Great Escape, he made a string of pretty good movies. In the sixties the only real dud in his filmography is Baby the Rain Must Fall. And that’s mostly due to the ridiculous sight of Steve trying to play a folk singer. Whereas Paul Newman for his whole career did a considerable amount of low-profile movies along with some iconic ones. I mean, some of the movies Newman agreed to do over the years are really baffling. When I was writing my adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch (which I retitled Jackie Brown), and I had to consider who was to play the novel’s likable lead male Max Cherry, I had a few choices. Gene Hackman was an obvious choice, as was Paul Newman. I also considered John Saxon. But there was something about Robert Forster in Alligator that really stuck with me. So I started writing the script right down to the discussion with Jackie about Max's thinning hair.

In real life everything suggests Steve McQueen could be a real hothead. In Don Siegel’s autobiography he relates that a few times during the making of Hell Is for Heroes the two men almost came to blows. Apparently McQueen and his costar on that film, Bobby Darin, also couldn’t stand each other. When actor/writer James Bacon once mentioned to Darin that McQueen was his own worst enemy, Darin replied, “Not while I’m alive.” But McQueen’s Lt. Frank Bullitt is no hothead. He is the epitome of cool. Paul Newman's kind of cool was different from McQueen, a more reserved kind. Oddly, actress Lita Milan had brief flings in the same year 1958 with both Paul Newman (co-star in The Left-Handed Gun) and with Steve McQueen while filming Never Love a Stranger (directed by Robert Stevens).

Lee Remick also had a brief affair with McQueen while filming Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) and allegedly she had appeared interested in Newman while she played Eula in The Long, Hot Summer (1958). Of course, Newman ignored Remick as he'd go on to shrug off other of his co-stars' advances. One of the key differences, besides their acting styles between Newman and McQueen, is that Newman was only macho onscreen. Offscreen he was much more progressive and left-leaning than the womanizer and Republican McQueen.

Former MCA Producer Jennings Lang offered the role of Dirty Harry to Paul Newman (probably sometime soon after Harper). But Newman turned it down. According to Lang, “Newman said he thought it was too tough a role, that he couldn’t play that type of character.” Universal sold the script by Harry Julian Fink and R. M. Fink to Warner Bros., where it was going to be made with Frank Sinatra playing Harry and directed by Irv Kirshner. Then Sinatra sprained his wrist, seriously limiting his ability to wield Callahan’s .44 Magnum. Warner offered it to Clint Eastwood, who agreed on the condition that he could bring Don Siegel over from Universal to direct. It was also Siegel’s most political film since his earlier masterpiece, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With Body Snatchers, the liberal-leaning Siegel was able to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand, it can be read as a subtextual attack on McCarthyism (its most popular reading). But on the other hand, the film also plays into the Red Nightmare paranoia of the fifties, being the communists referred as The Pod People. In many of Siegel’s stories working for producers and studio executives he didn’t respect, the director referred to them as 'Pod People'. 

But in the seventies cop thriller, the subtextual attack is of a much different political bent. Dirty Harry tells the story of the quintessential Siegel protagonist taken to its logical extreme. Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is the baddest-ass cop on the San Francisco police force. In a different era he’d be portrayed as a by-the-book type. Except in the era and location the movie takes place (San Francisco in the early seventies), in Callahan’s opinion, the book has been rewritten in favor of the scum. Society is screaming police brutality. The public is siding with the crooks. And the gutless police brass, local government, and the courts are cowed into compliance with an increasingly permissive social order that favors lawbreakers over law enforcement. The genius of the film is it takes that transgressive character and pits him up against a fictionalized version of San Francisco’s real-life “Zodiac Killer” (this fictionalized “Scorpio” is another calculating mastermind). 

Master bank robber Doc McCoy, who’s just served four years in prison, is given parole in exchange for orchestrating a robbery for a local bigwig named Beynon (played in the movie by Ben Johnson), who sits on the parole board. The deal is brokered by McCoy’s robbery accomplice wife, Carol (it’s inferred in the movie it was her mistake that put Doc behind bars). The Getaway was put into production during a serious time of transition in Steve McQueen’s life. He and his wife, friend, and confidant Neile McQueen were finalizing their divorce. Steve had moved out of their Malibu home and taken up residence at the Chateau Marmont. After passing at the last minute on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (due to his rivalry with Paul Newman), McQueen embarked on three offbeat projects that all ended in failure. Who would play the female colead, Carol McCoy? Robert Evans had been aggressively pushing the idea of a teaming between his wife Ali MacGraw, and Steve McQueen. In retrospect, this is ironic, because it would be while she was making The Getaway she would leave the mogul and marry her costar Steve McQueen. I asked Walter Hill who he thought would have made a good Carol McCoy. He said he had favored Stella Stevens, but McQueen didn't want Stevens, he wanted Ali MacGraw. Hill said the actresses that got the most consideration were Lauren Hutton and Geneviève Bujold. But that idea ended up blowing up when McQueen waited in a bar to meet Bujold to discuss the film, and she came walking in with Maximilian Schell. Neile (ex-wife of McQueen) had decided to retaliate by having an affair with Max Schell. So when Geneviève Bujold walked through the barroom doorway with the man who screwed his wife, McQueen got distracted and proceeded to beat the living shit outta Maximilian Schell.

For Sam Peckinpah, Carol bedding Beynon was very important in the context of the story. For first time viewers it’s easy to assume, to get her man out of Huntsville, she was forced against her will into the sexual bargain. But Peckinpah decidedly does not dramatize it that way. The film insinuates she was not just willing to do it for Doc; she was willing to do it for Beynon. It even tries to insinuate that Carol has to debate her choice of which man to stay with. And in the confrontation scene where Carol shoots Beynon, the movie tries to convince us that maybe Carol is in league with the Texas power broker against her husband. Later Doc accuses her, “I think you liked it. I think he got to you.” Carol answers Doc back, “Maybe I got to him.” If Beynon wasn’t played by Ben Johnson, this whole three-way sexual dynamic could have worked. It’s not just you can’t imagine Ben Johnson having sex with Ali MacGraw, you can’t imagine Ben Johnson having sex. No less Ali MacGraw’s Carol seriously considering leaving Steve McQueen’s Doc for Ben Johnson’s Beynon. This whole subplot could have been far more effective if Beynon had been played by somebody a little closer to McQueen. Joe Don Baker would have been the fantastic natural choice. But I can also see Robert Culp or Stuart Whitman delivering what was required to make the triangle dynamic work.

“The Getaway was the last time Steve was in a movie as ‘the Steve McQueen’ we liked to see,” Walter Hill stated. “He did a few other movies and he did good performances, but that special quality that made Steve—‘Steve’—was really never on display again.” And I agree with Hill. I don’t even see The Getaway as a crime thriller about a pair of on-the-lam robbers, with a massive manhunt coming from both sides hot on their trail. I now realize what Peckinpah made and what McQueen and McGraw performed was a love story. The crime story is literal. The love story is metaphorical. Nevertheless, when it comes to Peckinpah fans, Steve McQueen fans, the one thing everybody seemed to agree on is that in the role of Carol McCoy, Ali MacGraw was lousy. And for the last forty years, I too was one of those Ali MacGraw bashers. That is until recently. It took me over forty years, but now I see Ali MacGraw’s performance differently. First off, let me start by saying, she’s not the Carol McCoy of the book or Walter Hill’s screenplay. If you want that Carol, then nothing is going to replace Peckinpah’s first choice of Stella Stevens (except possibly Linda Haynes). No, MacGraw’s Carol might not be one-half of the greatest bank robbing couple in crime film literature. But instead she is one-half of one of the greatest love stories in crime film cinema.

While she doesn’t offer the characterization of a professional armed robber, she does offer up the minute by minute, scene by scene, emotional reality of a woman trying to keep a relationship from crumbling into pieces. The couple pass through a physical and emotional gauntlet, and lurch from one catastrophe to another. While McQueen alternates between keeping his cool and losing his cool, Carol feels, Carol hurts, Carol is afraid. She’s heartbreaking and heartbroken when she loses the suitcase full of loot to Richard Bright’s cowboy con man thief. She waits there in the train station for Doc, not knowing for sure if he’s going to return, in utter despair. "Did I blow it? Did I just ruin everything? How could I be so stupid?" It’s my feeling that Ali MacGraw’s moment to moment work in this film is sensational. In real life she was living through everything that she was hired to portray as Carol. Carol with Beynon—MacGraw with her husband Robert Evans. She’s a woman having to deal with a very difficult, mercurial, masculine man amidst a grueling endeavor. Carol on the lam with Doc—MacGraw making this incredibly difficult movie with McQueen and Peckinpah. She’s a woman in love—so was MacGraw. When the film came out in the States and England, MacGraw was roasted by the critics. Everywhere,  except in France. From the very beginning, the French always saw the film as a love story. And in France the critics praised the emotional content of McGraw's performance.

While the couple rests in that torn apart Volkswagen bug at the garbage dump, Carol threatens to “split.” If Carol loses faith, all is lost. It’s Doc’s savvy and survival prowess that keeps them from getting caught. It keeps them getting a little further down the road. But it’s Carol that keeps them together. It’s Carol that saves Doc from his self-destructive impulses. It’s Carol that knows if they don’t make it together . . . they don’t make it. If she throws in the towel, it was truly all for nothing. Until Doc can not only forgive her for Beynon, but trust completely that she did it for the right reason, he’s still in Huntsville. Finally, Doc comes to this realization. But Carol demands from her husband, “No matter what ever else happens, no more about him.” And he agrees, “No matter whatever else happens—no more about him.” And the two finally are reunited. Walking together, one arm draped around her, holding her close. His other arm carrying the pump-action shotgun he stole from the sporting goods store. Backed by a sea of garbage, those terrible trash-eating birds flying around in the sky, and the dump trucks moving mountains of trash, yet for the first time in the movie we know they’re going to be alright. “Whatever else happens.” —Cinema Speculation (2022) by Quentin Tarantino

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (Paradise)

 

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (Paradise) video. Soundrack "Paradise" and other songs by Ellen Forrest and Artie Shaw.

Acting Method Training, Paul Newman

Examining the neural basis of dramatic acting. While all people play multiple roles in daily life—for example, ‘spouse' or ‘employee'—these roles are all facets of the ‘self' and thus of the first-person perspective. Compared to such everyday role playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions and behaviours. Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be, by assuming a ‘fictional first-person' perspective. Through a series of functional MRI studies, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing. Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced visible reductions in brain activity and deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe. Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a ‘loss of self'. Dramatic acting is the process of portraying a character in the context of a theatrical performance. Acting can be thought of as a form of pretence, in particular the act of pretending to be someone who the actor is not. This idea is central to the acting method derived from the writings of Stanislavski that dominates the teaching and practice of acting in North America. Despite the central importance of role playing to social interaction, the topic of role playing has scarcely been examined in experimental psychology or cognitive neuroscience. Instead, there is a large literature devoted to the perceptual phenomenon of theory-of-mind, which is the process of inferring the intentions, thoughts and emotions of other people. It is about decoding the intentions of others, and displaying those intentions to people in the context of a theatrical performance.

In a general sense, acting methods can be polarized along the lines of being either ‘outside-in' or ‘inside-out', although these approaches are thought of by most acting theorists as complementary methods for getting into character. Outside-in approaches are gestural methods that emphasize the physical and expressive techniques of the actor. In contrast to this, inside-out approaches are psychological methods that rely on perspective-taking and identification with the character. The Stanislavski's approach is strongly oriented towards interpreting the motivations and emotions of the character. Actors appear to be living through the performance as if the events were happening to them. Achieving this can involve a large degree of 3P perspective-taking with the character. However, it is important to keep in mind that, while the process of assuming a 3P perspective on a character may be a central part of the preparatory phrase of learning a role, it should not, according to Stanislavski's method, be an active process during a performance itself. The commonly understood goal of method acting is for the actor to ‘become' the character in performance. The principal objective of the current study was to examine dramatic acting for the first time using functional neuroimaging methods. The imaging results showed that acting led to deactivations in brain areas involved in self processing. These findings might suggest that acting, as neurocognitive phenomenon, is a suppression of self processing. The major increase in activation associated with role change was seen in the posterior part of the precuneus. If so, then the deactivations seen in the prefrontal cortex for acting would represent a loss of self processing related to a trait-based conception of the self.

It is telling to point out that acting theorists for over a century have talked about the ‘split consciousness' involved in the process of acting. The actor has to be himself and someone else at the same time, and this could lead to a splitting of attentional resources devoted to the focalization of attention and consciousness. This is not simply the ‘divided attention' of multi-tasking procedures, but a fundamental split of resources devoted to a maintenance of one's identity as a conscious self. According to this interpretation, activation of the precuneus would represent a dispersion of self-related attentional resources, whereas deactivation would represent a focalization or internalization of such resources. Neither gestural modification in the form of a foreign accent nor other-orientation in the form of 3P mentalizing had an influence on this neural mechanism, whereas the explicit psychological process of role change through character portrayal did, perhaps resulting in the double consciousness that acting theorists talk about. Again, acting was the only condition in which self-identity was explicitly split during the task. We conclude that the loss of deactivation in the precuneus for the acting process might represent a departure from a unified and focalized sense of consciousness, towards the dual consciousness that typically characterizes dramatic acting. The most surprising finding of the study was that gestural changes while still maintaining the self-identity led to a pattern of deactivations similar to that for acting. This study was approved by the Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board, St Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton (protocol no. 10-3457). Source: royalsocietypublishing.org

In the early 1950s, Paul Newman seemed the most unthreatening of Hollywood’s angry young men – less eruptive than Marlon Brando, less twitchy than Montgomery Clift, less surly than James Dean. Tempering the fury unleashed by the others, he played a redeemed hoodlum in Somebody Up There Likes Me and an introverted outlaw in The Left Handed Gun. Eventually, as a fated loser in Cool Hand Luke and a wise-cracking robber in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he settled down to be wry and irresistibly charming. Like the alcoholic husband he played in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman relied on liquor to ease him into a merciful numbness in real life. Newman developed his crackpot theory, probably concocted when he was sloshed, which maintains that the British never get as drunk as Americans do because they like warm beer and don’t put ice in whisky, which means that their bodies have no need to heat up the alcohol they consume to blood temperature before it can be absorbed. “My whole system,” he said, “was based on catching up with those ice cubes.” 

It’s a shrewd comment on his emotional refrigeration: those blue eyes do often seem glacial. Attending classes for method actors, who were expected to draw on their emotional memories when on stage, Newman realised that he “didn’t know enough about my own feelings to start examining them.” Fear and danger ejected him from this state of anaesthesia. Hence his obsession with racing cars, which began with a movie role as a grand prix driver in Winning but took him “outside that fictional experience into something real”. Newman also encouraged his son, Scott – an addict and an unsuccessful actor, with whom his relationship was “a dance of death” – to take high-speed risks on the road. Scott seemed to have never forgiven that his father had left his mother Jackie (now Robinson) for "that Southern magnolia," referring to Joanne. Paul warned Scott to control his words.

And Joanne, despite her good intentions, had difficulty in connecting with Scott. Joanne had help at home with some nannies and maids when it was necessary, but she was very warm with Jackie's children, and Paul felt Scott was ungrateful to her. At one lacerating moment, Newman recalls that he considered shooting himself to rid Scott of “the affliction that was me”; eventually, it was the unhappy Scott who died prematurely. Some friends wondered why Newman chose to direct a telefilm based on Michael Cristofer’s play The Shadow Box in 1980 because it dealt with death and terminal illness. His son, Scott, had not been dead for very long, and Newman’s mother was to die of cancer two years later (it might already have been diagnosed at this point). The truth was Joanne was friends with Cristofer and Newman would do virtually anything to please Joanne.

After his death, Elizabeth Taylor, who had starred with Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, claimed that “I loved that man with all my heart. He was goodness and kindness and pure integrity.” Given his psychological record, Newman refused to take credit for his much-praised philanthropy, that also applies to his political activities in support of candidates who opposed the Vietnam war; though he voted Democrat, Newman defined himself as “an emotional Republican” – stoic and self-contained. He was serious about giving back to the community — He knew he was lucky, good looking - but didn’t often feel worthy of all the accolades, so at least he could give his money to causes where it might make a difference. Recalling his not so extraordinary trajectory in romance when young, he says: I was 15. And just as Mary Jane Phipps was about to lay back in the hay and enjoy my advances, I started sneezing. I was absolutely crippled. There’d be no lengthy kisses, because there was no way I could breathe through my nose. My losing streak continued even after I enrolled at Ohio University before being drafted. I auditioned for a part in a student production and actually got the role. It didn’t take long before I became infatuated with another cast member, a statuesque French beauty who was likely a full head taller than me; I loved to dance with her because I could just lay my head on her chest. I think she was indifferent to me, but I did finally manage to get a real date with her. I had visions of, if not getting laid, then at least rubbing my lips across her neck. As I prayed for an invitation up to her room, she patted me on the head and affectionately said, “I like going out with you because you’re so harmless!” I was aware that beautiful girls thought I was a joke, a happy buffoon.

"Sometime in the late fifties, I saw a poll in a popular magazine where they asked a group of women which well-known personality or actor they had sexual fantasies about. Well, the “winner” happened to be me. Which I guess is pretty funny, until you consider that had I been killed in my bomber during World War II, had I gone down in flames, that was as hot as things would have gotten for me. My first sexual encounter, for the record, was with an educated young lady from Jacksonville, Florida, where I would undergo part of my naval training. At 18, I’d been laid only twice. Which is a fact that likely would have both elated and displeased my mother." Probably, this losing streak with the dames until Newman met Jackie Witte, it would shape his respectful yet distant rapport he'd share with his leading ladies.

Throughout Newman's account of his life in The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man, there is a sense of real loneliness, a feeling like he wasn't always in control of his own life, and that he even resented the intrusion of fame. He found it boggling how women eventually found him to be such a sex symbol, as he could barely get a girl to even talk to him until after he had been discharged from the military. His mother Theresa treated him mostly like a prop and once he was married to his first wife, Theresa insisted they sleep in twin beds. Despite all his success, there was a clear message that Paul Newman wanted to live a private life. Newman felt he was an ordinary man gifted with extraordinary opportunities. Plagued with chronic insecurity, Newman felt for most of his life like an impostor who achieved success through mere luck rather than talent. Although he reached onscreen rare moments of revelation that proved his talent throughout his long career, Newman probably would not accept that he had much talent at all. There was nothing ordinary about Paul Newman, the Oscar-winning actor, prize-winning race car driver and philanthropist who gave away more than $700 million to charities. The problem of this memoir is that probably the reader won't feel no closer to understanding Paul Newman after reading this thoughts than before. Source: kirkusreviews.com

Cloris Leachman's memoirs, Free Love

Cloris Leachman: As Miss Chicago, I was automatically a contestant in the Miss America Pageant. I was spinning from the way things were happening so I called my mother. She flew first to Chicago and then on to Atlantic City with me. Today contestants have all kinds of people to assist them in the Miss America contest, but there was no one there to aid or guide us. In the formal part of the contest, I wore the one evening gown I had from college. Right before I went out, Mama said, “Sparkle, Cloris!” And I sparkled. I was third runner-up. That was fine with me. I didn’t care about being Miss America. I much preferred winning the prize of one thousand dollars and having no further responsibilities. Three months after I’d arrived in New York, I met Irving Hoffman, an executive with the Hollywood Reporter. He invited me to the opening night of a play, Mr. Peebles and Mr. Hooker. During the intermission, Irving introduced me to William Liebling, a prominent theatrical agent. They were looking for someone just like me, a sincere, average American girl type. He told me that tomorrow morning I should be at the Broadhurst Theater. Bill Liebling and his wife, Audrey Wood, had one of the classiest agencies in the city. Liebling represented actors; Audrey represented authors, particularly Tennessee Williams. Kazan was the monarch of the New York theater. 

Kazan had directed most of the recent stage hits and nearly all of Tennessee Williams’s plays, including the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando. In 1947 Kazan had forged an exclusive group whose members included the cream of young New York actors. He’d called it the Actors Studio. Liebling was very smart. I took his advice about everything, and so the next afternoon I was at the building where the Actors Studio was housed. Kazan introduced himself. He said he’d seen me in A Story for a Sunday Evening and Come Back, Little Sheba, and he’d heard from other people how talented I was. He said we could start anytime we were ready. I had command of my emotions, and I could select out of the past only the part I wanted, only what was useful to me. I was welcomed into the Actors Studio, and was in the company of the best young actors in the country: Julie Harris, Kim Stanley, Eli Wallach, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Steve Hill, James Whitmore, Maureen Stapleton. When I met Marilyn she was even more gorgeous, more voluptuous—her eyes, her mouth, her body—in person than she appeared in her pictures. They asked me to understudy Nina Foch as well as another role in John Loves Mary, and I agreed. At the same time, I was understudying five separate roles in the play Happy Birthday, including the lead role, which was being performed by the first lady of the American theater, Helen Hayes. 

New York was different then. I walked all the way home one night from the Old Nick, on the Lower East Side, on Eighty-seventh Street on upper Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum Of Art. I walked the whole way without a suggestion of fear. It occurs to me as I look back that there were two possibilities: either New York wasn’t dangerous in those days or I was just plain ignorant. Marlon became very close to Ellen, Stella Adler’s daughter, and their relationship lasted all through Marlon’s life. Kazan  and his buddies took care of me like I was Snow White, always making sure I had a place to stay. I managed to get small jobs on TV shows, nothing important, but I earned enough to keep myself in New York. Marlon took me to dinner at Sardi once but his stare looked so cruel that I couldn't handle it and I left crying. Marlon asked me out several times, but I didn’t go. I felt he’d want to take me to his apartment and probably it wouldn’t be clean. 

Also, Marlon was after every girl that twitched, and I didn’t want to be one of the multitude. “I always thought Cloris was the most talented one at the Studio,” Marlon said later. “That made me curious as to who she’d wind up marrying. What’s it like? Pretty madcap, George?” “Madcap, madhouse. Something with mad in it,” replied my husband George Englund. I can’t say that overall and through the years, I was close to Marlon. I think he saw me as an obstacle to his having the friendship he wanted with George. Marlon was unpredictable to me. The worst thing that happened between us came right after his son Christian killed Cheyenne’s boyfriend in Marlon’s house. I was sad for Marlon, but it didn’t occur to me that he’d like to hear from me. I imagined the whole world was sending condolences and trying to speak to him, and the absence of anything from me would not be of particular notice. And yet Marlon told George he would never forgive me for not contacting him after the tragedy had happened in his life. And he didn’t. George was a college graduate, while Marlon didn’t finish high school. They both went to military school. Marlon was thrown out of his, George was the highest-ranking officer at his. Both in military school and in the navy, George learned an ethic that he lived by. Marlon didn’t seem to me to have any moral commitment. 

Paul Newman was a moral man, no question. He didn’t do things self-consciously to get applause, to get noticed. He just went about being one of the great movie stars of all time and one of the kindest men of his century. George and me saw a lot of the Newmans. I did two movies with Paul: The Rack (1956) which was my first film after Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and then WUSA in 1970. It was a depressing political drama. George and me had had trouble in our marriage. I didn't know if the Newmans might have had theirs.  George had confessed to me he had been seduced by Joan Collins. We were talking about divorce. 

I remember one night that Joanne was busy in the wardrobe department, I couldn't resist to initiate an overture to Paul, something I'd later regret, since Joanne was one of my best friends. Of course, Paul, always the gentleman, acted as if nothing had happened. Our boys grew up parallel to the Newmans’ three girls, Nell, Lissy, and Clea. We and the Newmans shared parallel tragedies—the death of Paul’s son Scott and the death of our son Bryan, both from drugs. Paul Newman was put on the stage of life, and in his walk across it, he did indeed prove, in all the ways a man can, he was the most loyal. —Cloris (2009) by Cloris Leachman and George Englund

Paul Newman: "I don't like to discuss my marriage, but I will tell you something which may sound corny but which happens to be true. I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger? It's not because I've been called a sex-symbol that I have to commit adultery."

In the notes for his poem Queen Mab (1813), Percy Shelley declares that ‘love is free’. He rejected monogamy, and tried to convince the women in his life to do the same. Not many people today would be shocked by this. A YouGov survey in 2020 of adults in the United States found that, of those who are in a relationship, more than a quarter are non-monogamous. But free love – by which I mean the idea that both men and women should be allowed to have sex outside of marriage, and to carry on multiple relationships at once, without judgment or persecution – was not always with us. It had to be invented. For centuries in Europe, nobody openly defended, and few dared to imagine the possibility of, greater sexual freedom for both men and women. Free love was invented in 1792, the year Shelley was born. It started when the French Revolutionaries challenged the absolute power of King Louis XVI, they energised radicals, and terrified conservatives, by questioning all traditional values. Suddenly, sexual morality was up for debate alongside monarchist government. 

The French Revolution had an electric impact on radical thinking around the world, and inspired people to reconsider the values of their own societies. At the time, Britain’s radical intellectuals were mostly a tight-knit group, centered around the publisher Joseph Johnson. His stable of authors gathered at his London home to debate the issues of the day. One of its brightest lights was Mary Wollstonecraft, the child of a shiftless, alcoholic father, who watched her family come down the social ladder fast. Forced to earn a living without formal education, she tried her hand at working as a governess before making her way to London in 1787, determined to become a writer. 

Charismatic, intellectually voracious, she blazed in conversation, fascinating and intimidating the mostly male authors who made up Johnson’s circle. And she made questions of gender and sexuality a major topic for debate. Wollstonecraft was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), defending the Revolutionaries from the attacks of Edmund Burke. She followed this with her feminist masterpiece A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she attacked the well-established double standard whereby male libertinism is tolerated while women’s lives are punished by sexual transgressions. But her central purpose was to make the case for female education. 

Another of the authors whom Johnson published, Thomas Holcroft, showed the influence of Wollstonecraft’s feminism in his novel Anna St Ives (1792), as well as that of the French Revolution’s most radical ideas. Though his book was published the same year as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Holcroft had had a preview of Wollstonecraft’s arguments, which he heard her discuss at Johnson’s dinners. Unlike his best friend William Godwin, who was put off by Wollstonecraft’s domineering conversational style, Holcroft was entranced by her. He would later write her a gushing fan letter, calling her ‘the philosopher that traces, compares and combines facts for the benefit of future times.’ Holcroft’s novel dramatises Wollstonecraft’s guiding ideal: that of an educated woman who cultivates a friendship with an equally enlightened man, based on reason and shared values. The novel’s main character, Anna, spends her time in conversation with her friend Frank, imagining what a perfect society would look like. They decide that any future utopia must abolish private property. 

William Godwin was at that time writing his tract, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) – essentially, a defence of philosophical anarchism. Pressed by Holcroft, Godwin added a section on intimate relationships. Godwin concludes that marriage should be abolished, and monogamy along with it. People should be free to have as many relationships as they want. He makes it clear, however, that sex is something he doesn’t personally enjoy, and doesn’t think other people should either. He says that, in a society where government and property are absent, humans would develop into more refined beings who had no need for ‘sexual intercourse’. If Godwin was the first person to openly defend polyamory, he also managed to take all the fun out of it. At the end of 1792, Wollstonecraft returned to England, where she began a new relationship – with Godwin. The two could not have been more different – she was passionate and charismatic; he austere and preacherly – but they made it work. Wollstonecraft was soon pregnant, and in order to spare their child the stigma of illegitimacy, they decided to get married. 

Percy Shelley was in his late teens when he first encountered the works of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, He had a prodigious talent for poetry, the looks of an angel, and an insatiable appetite for controversy. As his widow later attested, he was ‘like a spirit from another sphere’. Kicked out of Oxford for his open atheism, he had allied himself with various radical political causes. And he used ‘the Godwinian plan’ as a short-hand term for free love. In 1812, on learning, to his surprise, that Godwin was still alive, Shelley sought out the old philosopher. Later that same year, he met Godwin’s daughter Mary, then 15 years old, and he was immediately entranced. Shelley, who was married at the time, spent his days in philosophical conversation with Godwin, then snuck away in the evenings with Mary. She took him to her favourite refuge: Old Saint Pancras churchyard, where her mother was buried. They may have first had sex on Wollstonecraft’s grave.

Shortly after they left England, Shelley insisted Mary read one of his favourite books, The Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women (1811). It was written by the most extreme of Wollstonecraft’s free-love disciples, the eccentric aristocrat James Henry Lawrence. Born in Jamaica in 1773 to a wealthy planter family, Lawrence was a friend of Godwin’s, whom he had encountered many times at the British Museum. The novel, which pays tribute to Wollstonecraft in its title, is a utopian depiction of the Nair people of Malabar, on the southwestern coast of India. Lawrence portrays the Nairs as devotees of unrestricted sexual liberty. In his novel’s introduction, Lawrence borrows Wollstonecraft’s attack on the double standard of chastity, while neatly inverting her conclusion. ‘Let every female,’ he declares, ‘live perfectly uncontrolled by any man, and enjoying every freedom; let her choose and change her lover as she please.’ The novel’s closing words are a salute to Wollstonecraft: ‘Success to the rights of women!’ 

Shelley rejected mere promiscuity, as he said in a review of Hogg’s novel, The Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff (1813). Hogg adored Shelley, and the book was a clumsy attempt to fictionalise Shelley’s ideals. But Shelley wrote that he could not regard the novel’s endorsement of ‘promiscuous concubinage without horror and detestation’. Shelley did not think sex could be divorced from love, and he saw love in elevated, indeed spiritual, terms. He believed we are moved to love by the beauty we see in others – be it ‘in thought, action, or person’. This doctrine was inspired by Plato’s Symposium, which Shelley devoted a summer to translating in 1818. In Plato, he found confirmation of Wollstonecraft’s idea that true love represents a partnership of equals. For the poet, there was something almost supernatural about such a union: ‘We should make that another’s nerves vibrated to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood.’ Sex, he believed, was a natural and integral part of this mystical union. When we are in love, physical passion irresistibly follows. He condemned chastity as ‘a monkish and evangelical superstition’.While she was in Paris, a Frenchwoman, trying to impress Wollstonecraft told the author that she saw no need to engage in physical affairs. Wollstonecraft replied tartly: ‘Tant pis pour vous.’ (‘The worse for you.’)

Wollstonecraft, like Shelley, believed that an ideal relationship was born from a union of romantic love and physical passion. She too saw it in almost mystical terms. She told her lover Gilbert Imlay that he could never know ‘the ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from a unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination, that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous.’ For her, it was this fusion of love and sex that alone could provide ‘the distinctive characteristic of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have no idea.’ Shelley could not have put it better. Shelley died in 1822 and, in Britain, his ideas on free love were mostly forgotten as the country lurched towards the conservatism of the Victorian era. What we now know as the Free Love movement began in the US in the 1850s, and was shaped by the ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier and the anarchist Josiah Warren. The Free Lovers’ objectives were closer to those of Wollstonecraft than to Shelley. They sought to give women easier access to divorce and birth control, but mostly left the norm of monogamy unchallenged. 

Shelley’s more radical ideas would have to wait another century to find a mainstream audience. Not until the sexual revolution of the 1960s did radical groups like the Weathermen turn ‘smash monogamy’ into a rallying cry, making free love an integral part of the counterculture. The 21st century has taken non-monogamy mainstream. And there are plenty of options: from polyamory, to swinging, to friends with benefits, to something called relationship anarchy, the structure of which ‘is the lack of structure itself’ – whatever that means. The relative merits of these choices are discussed endlessly in the media and online. Shelley would have undoubtedly surveyed this bewildering landscape with some pride. But what would Wollstonecraft have made of it all? It is hard to say. Perhaps she would, at the very least, view it with the same equanimity that she ultimately found in dealing with Imlay’s compulsive philandering. Realising he was never going to change, she told him, simply: ‘Be happy!’ Source: aeon.co

John Garfield retrospective, Paul Newman

The Criterion Channel is hosting a November retrospective of films featuring the late John Garfield, a superstar of the nineteen-forties whose body of work has long gone under-recognized. In the course of a career that stretched from the height of the studio system to the depths of the Red Scare, Garfield pioneered a new, naturalistic approach to acting for the camera, one rooted in the same techniques that would soon be called the Method. Garfield died in 1952, his performances overshadowed by the actors who followed him—particularly Marlon Brando, who rose to fame playing Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a role that Garfield had turned down in fear of being eclipsed by Vivien Leigh. It’s tempting to see Garfield, who worked as the doorman for the first session of the Actors Studio, in 1947, as also holding the anti-hero's door open for Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, and others to walk through. 

He was far better than his contemporaries at solving the puzzle of how to take the new acting techniques coming out of the New York theatre during the thirties and forties and adapt them for the screen. His best performances have a timeless brilliance; they feel classical and contemporary at once. John Garfield never wanted to be a movie star. He was a creature of the Great Depression whose early life included familial neglect and riding the rails reciting “The Raven” for his supper. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, he acted with the Group Theatre, a company responding to the Depression with a utopian, left-wing vision of the American character. The Group included many of the future stewards of acting instruction in America—Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner—as well as the directors Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman. It was the most exciting theatre company in America, but it rarely found financial success. Garfield left the company to better support his family and because he felt cheated out of a role that had been promised to him. He moved to Los Angeles, making his film début, in 1938, in “Four Daughters,” for which he received an Oscar nomination. "He never lived long enough to become an icon like Humphrey Bogart", said David Heeley, one of the producers of "The John Garfield Story" on TCM.

One of the best examples of Garfield’s combination of deep feeling and minimalist restraint can be found in “Dust Be My Destiny” (1939), the earliest film in the Criterion series. In it, he plays Joe Bell, a defiant drifter who is wrongfully accused of murder, running from the law with his wife, Mabel, who’s played by Priscilla Lane. His performance is a perfect mixture of sweetness and rebellion; it reveals both the exoskeleton his character has grown to protect himself from the deprivations of the Great Depression and the good kid hiding underneath it. In 1945, John Garfield gave a lecture to the Actors’ Laboratory Theatre, a Stanislavski-based school and playhouse run by alumni of the Group. “I would much rather talk about the theatre because I think the movies are not an actor’s medium,” he said. “Movies are a writer’s and director’s medium.” At the time, Garfield was nearing the end of his contract with Warner Bros., and growing increasingly discontented. While his films had mostly succeeded at the box office, he was personally proud of only a few of them. 

“My problem in movies has been to find the truth,” he told the Actors’ Lab. “When I don’t, I fail miserably.” In the next few years, he turned down several projects—including future noir classics such as “Out of the Past” and “Nightmare Alley”—to work with Enterprise, an upstart independent production company that promised artists near-complete freedom. After making “Body and Soul,” Enterprise’s lone profitable film, he moved back to New York City to return to his first love, theatre, starring in “Skipper Next to God,” which was directed by his old mentor Lee Strasberg. His career, with its emphasis on versatility, seriousness, artistry, and political commitment, provided a template that generations of male movie stars to come, from Marlon Brando to Paul Newman to Robert De Niro, would follow. 

"He was shy, vibrant and very intelligent. And so ahead of his time. He had terrific magnetism. I wish we had him back," said John Garfield's 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' co-star Lana Turner during a 1973 film homage for her at New York City's Town Hall. "The only co-star I know that he had an affair with, actually, was Lana Turner," Vincent Sherman (director of Saturday's Children, The Young Philadelphians, etc.) remembered. In 1950, Warner Bros. quietly released “The Breaking Point” and pulled it from theatres shortly after its release; it's probably Garfield’s greatest film. An adaptation of Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not,” the movie stars Garfield as Harry Morgan, a down-on-his-luck ship captain who runs into financial trouble in Mexico and takes a job smuggling Chinese migrants to the United States. The job goes wrong, and Morgan ends up under investigation and in dire financial straits. Later Garfield said of the film, "I think it's the best I've done since 'Body and Soul'. Better than that." 

In "Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture" (1996), Jerome Charyn writes: "In The Hustler Robert Rossen tried to grapple with the texture of failure and success, all the peculiar twists of talent, and the kind of vulturous deadness that attaches itself to talent—eating it alive. This is a different Newman, not an acting mask. He's lithe, possessed. He's not a beautiful sleepwalker like in Hud. He reeks of promise and vulnerability. Perhaps it's Fast Eddie's own deep flaw, his need to wound himself, that touched Paul Newman, and opened up his own wounds. It's certainly the best performance that Newman gave in the 1960s. 'The Hustler' was almost a companion film for 'Body & Soul' and has the courage to investigate those dark corners of the psyche where few American directors had gone before. It's a film about human dirt". Source: www.newyorker.com