Paul Newman: Mercurial Life, Mercurial Talent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America’s Favorite Marilyn Monroe Cliché

In her article America’s Favorite Marilyn Monroe Cliché for The Atlantic, Sarah Churchwell (author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) deconstructs the pernicious trope that Marilyn was a false identity imposed by the studios upon the ‘real’ Norma Jeane – as propagated by biographers and in popular culture, and most recently in the wildly misleading Netflix ‘biopic’, Blonde. Most films that are widely reviled upon release simply evaporate into their own disfavour. Yet Andrew Dominik’s recent Netflix film, Blonde, has lingered in the public consciousness after its release and subsequent criticism for a simple reason: the enduring star power of Marilyn Monroe. ‘I have to tell you immediately that I never would have written any book about Marilyn Monroe,’ Joyce Carol Oates said in an interview promoting the novel at the time. ‘I got very interested in writing about an American girl who is Norma Jeane Baker who becomes a celebrity later in life. To me, she’s always Norma Jeane.’ It was hardly a new idea then, and it isn’t one now. Since the first studio-written press release in 1946, the search for the real Norma Jeane behind the supposedly artificial persona of Marilyn Monroe has driven endless stories… We talk endlessly about the myth of Marilyn Monroe, but the myth of Norma Jeane is its foundation, encouraging people to express contempt for the ‘fake’ Monroe by pretending to love the ‘real’ Norma Jeane instead. 

In fact, Marilyn Monroe was a real person in every way recognised by our culture—except in our stories about her. The idea that Norma Jeane is both the real Monroe and a different person from Monroe is part of the myth of Marilyn Monroe. Regardless of how unconscious it may be, reducing the staggeringly successful Monroe to ‘little Norma Jeane’ has the undeniable effect of denying her power, keeping her infantilised and pathologised. That fundamental idea of Marilyn Monroe (as artifice) bleeds into any number of unquestioned clichés about her. One, for example, is that Norma Jeane hated Marilyn—as proved, supposedly, by the tragic circumstances of her death. Little that Marilyn Monroe actually said suggests this is true. In many interviews, especially in the fullness of her stardom, she spoke of self-respect, insisting upon her self-worth, asking people to take her seriously. Monroe’s drug addiction could be self-destructive, but it also likely spun beyond her control before she comprehended its dangers. Addiction doesn’t have to be a symptom of self-hatred: It might also provide escape from the  incomprehension of others.

Marilyn Monroe’s life did not happen to Norma Jeane. Norma Jeane is significant because she created Marilyn Monroe. If Norma Jeane had not turned herself into Marilyn, we would never have heard of her. But we don’t speak of Norma Jeane as being the agent of her own transformation; instead, we speak of Norma Jeane passively becoming Marilyn. We still refuse to do Marilyn Monroe the basic justice of crediting her for her own stardom. Marilyn was not put on a treadmill; she pushed and shoved her way onto it, and then beat the competition. Nor did anyone make her change her name: A casting director suggested it, and Monroe, hoping for stardom, agreed. ‘Monroe’ was, in fact, her mother’s maiden name. She legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe soon after she started her own production company: There is no reason to view her name change as anything other than a triumphant assertion of her identity. British journalist William J Weatherby (author of Conversations with Marilyn) said: "Marilyn had an ability, unique in my experience, to make her real persona remain elusive. If you just considered her a blonde bombshell, she'd play that for you, but she wouldn't have respect for you."

We also prefer Marilyn Monroe, but we flatly refuse to admit it. There is another Marilyn Monroe, recalled by those who actually knew her—a woman of tremendous determination, ambition, humor, and dedication to her craft. Her addiction to pills was serious; her stage fright was real and disabling; every one of her successes was met with gaslighting. But she rose above it all, fighting back, fighting them off, showing them up, until the day she took too many of the pills she routinely took too recklessly. ‘Everybody knows about her insecurities,’ another Monroe biography quoted her friend, the photographer Sam Shaw, as saying, ‘but not everybody knows what fun she was, that she never complained about silly things, that she never had a bad word to say about anyone, and that she had a wonderful, spontaneous sense of humour.’ The truly rare tribute to Marilyn Monroe would focus on her survivalism, her ambition and wit, the courage with which she fought her detractors. The great struggle of Marilyn’s life wasn’t her struggle against addiction, depression, and loneliness—it was her struggle for respect. ‘Some people have been unkind,’ she once said. ‘If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don’t expect me to be serious about my work. I’m more serious about that than anything.’ Marilyn wanted, above all, to progress and improve, but we don’t let her change—because then we’d have to change our minds and admit that she was one of America’s great success stories, instead of one of its favorite tragic myths. In truth, Marilyn Monroe offers one of the purest instances of the old American promise of reinvention.” Source: themarilynreport.com

Aesthetic value is a catch-all term that encompasses the beautiful, the sublime, the dramatic, the comic, the cute, the kitsch, the uncanny, and many other related concepts. It is a well-worn cliché that the practical person scorns aesthetic value. But there’s reason to think that it is the only way in which we can draw final positive value from the entire world. Thus, to the extent that we care whether or not we live in a good world, we must be aesthetically sensitive. We want to say that we are part of a good world, and even contribute to its goodness. And if we can say this, the value of our own lives is considerably more robust. Yet the world is, for the most part, not morally good. And even if people stopped treating each other so brutally, it is not clear that this would deliver a definite positive value so much as eliminate a definite negative value. In contrast, aesthetic value is precisely a way in which we can get positive final value from the world at large. 

The value of a beautiful or sublime thing is final because it needs no justification. There is currently some debate over whether depression cuts one off from appreciating beauty, but the philosopher Tasia Scrutton has plausibly argued that depression may only undermine the enjoyment of cheerful sunny scenes, and not the appreciation of the aspects that resonate with one’s condition while also elevating and dignifying it. Just as the dissonant chord in a piece of music is redeemed as part of a larger harmony, so disease and disorder can be redeemed when understood as parts of a larger grandeur. The world is not a jolly place, not a Walt Disney world, but one of struggling, sombre beauty. The dying is the shadow side of the flourishing. Part of the initial motivation for aestheticism was the failure of moral value to give us a positive value for the world. It is thus part of aestheticism to take moral evil seriously. In fact, we need not appreciate suffering to appreciate the person who suffers. Again, we can turn to the aesthetic version of sympathy. This is the aesthetic value we experience when we enjoy sympathetic characters in a fiction, but it is equally applicable to real-life individuals. It is aesthetic because it does not rely on having a personal relationship with the other person. 

Rather, it involves enjoying their rich and poignant individual qualities: the complexity of both charms and flaws that make up their character. It is an aesthetic version of the basic drive for love – the sense that a person is lovable, though we may not be in a loving relationship with them. Our aesthetic analysis of bad people is entirely compatible with morally condemning them. From an aesthetic perspective, we can curiously explore and be fascinated by evil, while also taking practical steps to minimise it wherever possible. –by Tom Cochrane (author of The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States (2018) and The Aesthetic Value of the World (2021). Source: aeon.co

Paul Newman: Masculinity with a sensitive side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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