Paul Newman (21 page)

I
F
J
OANNE SEEMED CONTENT TO RIDE ALONG WITH HIM, MAKING
the occasional film on her own but more often working with him, or indeed not at all, she still had some ambitions. So when Melville Shavelson, the writer-director of such innocuous comedies as
Houseboat
and
The Seven Little Foys
, approached her with a script called
Samantha
, about a tomboyish and opinionated fashion designer who poses as a courtesan to catch the eye of a sportswriter she meets in Paris, she took an interest. Rather than playing the sort of wallflower or dormouse she had portrayed in other films, a woman who would invariably blossom when shown the right attention by the right man, this script gave her character the upper hand;
she
would be the manipulator and the instigator of the relationship. “I love it,” she told Shavelson. “It’s the dirtiest script I ever read.”

She imagined Newman playing opposite her and, as Shavelson was hoping to film a large portion of the picture on location, another working vacation for the family in Paris. She approached her husband with the script. “I read it,” Newman remembered, “and I told her, ‘Well, I don’t think it’s fun. I don’t think it’s
anything.
’ She said, ‘I was thinking we might do it together.’ I said, ‘No,
you
do it, and I’ll watch and clap soundlessly from the wings.’”

But she was shrewd enough about the business and their respective places in it to know that his agreement to star opposite her would guarantee that the picture would be made, and she lit into him for his selfishness. “‘You son of a bitch!’” she hollered, in his recollection.
“ ‘Here I’ve made my career subservient to yours, I’ve raised your family, and not only my children but your children from another marriage…and now when I ask you to make a movie with me, you tell me there’s nothing in it for you!’” To his credit, he performed an immediate about-face and agreed to make the picture, which in fact was shot in Paris and was eventually retitled
A New Kind of Love.
“That’s how
that
project got off the ground,” he told a reporter. “The family wash.”

In fact, on the heels of
Hud
, he found himself gravitating to various uninspired projects for a number of similarly arbitrary reasons. He shot two more pictures in 1963, both with comic overtones. In
The Prize
, an adaptation of an Irving Wallace thriller about Cold War espionage in Stockholm during the week in which the Nobel Prizes are awarded, he played Andrew Craig, a wisecracking, boozing, womanizing novelist who has won the literature prize and stumbles upon a dastardly kidnap plot that no one else seems to realize is afoot. Director Mark Robson must have wanted the combination of effervescence and tension that Alfred Hitchcock could concoct, but he ended up with something far less, and Newman, delivering his lines in a droll snarl that sounded like a comedian’s version of a sophisticated drunk, was awful. He followed it with a small but charming role in a white elephant called
What a Way to Go!
, in which Shirley MacLaine marries and buries a string of husbands who make fortunes and then die in absurd accidents. (Among the other victims of her love and poor luck are Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, and Dick Van Dyke.) It was actually one of his most successful comic turns, lusty and earthy and foul-tempered, with a reasonable command of French and a saucy way with MacLaine. But it was a trifle, quickly forgotten.

Hud
, on the other hand, succeeded brilliantly. The film opened in the spring of 1963 and met with rapturous reviews. Among the critics calling it not only the best American picture of the year but one of the best Hollywood productions in memory were Judith Crist in the
New York Herald-Tribune
, Brendan Gill in
The New Yorker
, Arthur Knight in
The Saturday Review
, and Penelope Gilliatt in London’s
Observer.
In the
New York Times
, Bosley Crowther wrote about it twice, weeks apart, and compared it favorably with
La Dolce Vita
and
Room at the Top
as an indictment of contemporary mores. Newman, he wrote, “is
tremendous, a potent, voracious man, restless with all his crude ambitions, arrogant with his contempt, and churned up inside with all the meanness and misgivings of himself.” Even Dwight Macdonald of
Esquire
, who once wrote, “Paul Newman is simply not an actor and possibly not even alive,” had to concede the power of his work, albeit left-handedly: “Newman’s Hud is his best performance to date, a mild encomium.” Pauline Kael, in one of the reviews that made her career, wrote a lengthy appreciation in
Film Quarterly
, comparing
Hud
favorably to such Hollywood classics as
Casablanca
and
On the Waterfront.

Indeed, Newman was astounding—Ben Quick and Fast Eddie Felson combined, worked into fighting trim, filled with self-absorption and bravado and ambition and lust and unchecked by law or conscience or anyone in his vicinity who might take him down a peg. His Hud had been equipped with some psychological backstory that was meant to explain his awfulness—“My mama loved me but she died,” he barks at his father during a heated exchange—but Newman was less comfortable with that sort of theatrical material than he was with the raw, manly, badass stuff of the role: the swagger, violence, competitiveness, cunning, and imperiousness. It’s a well-acted film all around, and beautifully shot and scored and edited, but the unmistakable center of it is the evil, irresistible villain whom Newman builds and inhabits—a cross between Richard III and Elvis Presley.

The filmmakers always knew that they had good material on their hands and that the critics might go for it. What surprised them, though, was the response of the audience to such tart and morally ambiguous material. Hud was both the name and the face of the picture, and his callousness didn’t repel audiences—rather, it seemed to lure them in. Ritt, Newman, and the Ravetches had intended an indictment of a certain strain in the American character, and they were genuinely taken aback when the film’s strength at the box office was explained, in good mea sure, by the fact that a young audience saw Hud not as a heel but as a role model. Part of their miscalculation, as they saw it, was that Hud was simply too attractive. They had known that in order to get away with the things he did, the character would have to be handsome and appealing. “Most effective bastards are like that,” Ritt said. “Otherwise they’re not effective. They have to be very attractive and very charming.” But in
Newman they had perhaps too much of a good thing. Moviegoers, particularly young ones, wanted to emulate his style, his defiant attitude, his uniquely American and modern brand of hip. “I got a lot of letters after that picture from kids saying Hud was right,” Ritt recalled. “The old man’s a jerk, and the kid’s a schmuck, or a fag, or whatever they wanted to call him. And if I’d been near as smart as I thought I was, I would have seen that Haight-Ashbury was right around the corner. The kids were very cynical; they were committed to their own appetites, and that was it. That’s why the film did the kind of business it did—kids loved Hud. That son of a bitch that I hated, they loved.”

They weren’t alone. When Oscar nominations were announced,
Hud
received seven in all: for best actor (Newman), actress (Patricia Neal), supporting actor (Melvyn Douglas), and director, adapted screenplay, black-and-white cinematography, and black-and-white art direction.
*
Newman felt sufficiently burned by his previous brushes with the Academy Awards that he decided to play down his interest in the prize, revealing in advance not only that he would skip the ceremony and stay at home in New York but also that he intended to cast his vote for one of his rivals, Sidney Poitier, who’d been nominated for
Lilies of the Field.
And in so doing he backed a winner: Poitier won, as did
Hud
’s Neal and Douglas and James Wong Howe for his gorgeous photography.
Hud
was a certified hit, but Newman was still standing just outside the screen door of Hollywood royalty.

N
EWMAN HAD
acted with Poitier in
Paris Blues
, but he’d come into more frequent contact with his former costar during the previous year as he became actively involved in political issues. Newman had long had an inclination to public affairs and what he took to be the responsibilities of citizenship. As a boy, he’d observed his father’s softly spoken but ardent liberal leanings. While he was starting out in the acting profession, he looked on as various acquaintances fell victim to the
Hollywood blacklist. Striking closer to home was the ordeal of one of his cousins, Robert Newman. A son of Joe Newman’s, he worked as a researcher with General Electric and was literally hounded out of the country because of his politics, his marriage to a woman of Russian origins, and his acquaintance with homosexuals through his work with the Cleveland Play House.
*

Newman stuffed envelopes for Adlai Stevenson in 1952, spoke at rallies for Gore Vidal when he ran for Congress in upstate New York in 1960, testified to a New York State Assembly panel in 1962 about his belief that the government should not take a hand in censoring films, and took a public stand in favor of nuclear disarmament throughout the early 1960s, speaking of a desire to tour high schools and colleges to discuss the issue with young people and going so far as to tell Hedda Hopper that “people who can afford [bomb] shelters should put them in.”

In the summer of 1963, though, his commitment took a more specific and potentially volatile form. Along with Marlon Brando and Burt Lancaster, he headlined and helped organize a rally at Los Angeles’s old Wrigley Field in support of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; after the big public event, at which King and California governor Edmund G. Brown were in attendance, a private fund-raiser was held at Lancaster’s home, and Newman, Anthony Franciosa, Polly Bergen, and other Hollywood lights wrote checks to the SCLC. A few weeks later, on June 12, the very day Medgar Evers was gunned down in Mississippi, Brando and Newman joined the Congress for Racial Equality in a sit-in protest on the state capitol steps in Sacramento, drawing attention to the legislature’s failure to pass a fair-housing bill.

Newman was hardly alone in supporting the cause of civil rights. As that crucial year in the movement progressed, such notables as Charlton Heston, Tony Curtis, James Garner, Rita Moreno, Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., Sam Peckinpah, Blake Edwards, Robert Wise, and John Frankenheimer were among the cohort who joined him in making increasingly outspoken comments about the need for racial equality in American life. But he was willing not only to speak his mind politically but also to defend his right to do so in similarly unambiguous terms. “Because I am a motion picture personality, I am not prepared to ignore what happens around me,” he told
Variety
that summer. “Is it necessary or desirable to abdicate your responsibility as a citizen just because it might be safer for business? …I cannot conveniently forget my responsibilities.”

In August, just before the massive civil rights march on Washington, D.C., Newman joined Brando and Franciosa on a trip to Gadsden, Alabama, where hundreds of CORE activists had been arrested for picketing in favor of fair hiring practices at a local tire factory. The four flew into Birmingham, where Governor George Wallace watched their arrival without greeting them, then took a bus to Gadsden, meeting with local workers, many out-of-state activists, and, perhaps more to the point, the press. Brando took the lead as their spokesman, but Newman wasn’t shy about his presence and was especially rankled when he and his companions on the trip were branded as “rabblerousers” and “meddlers.” He told reporters that he and the other actors had often gladly served the State Department as goodwill ambassadors abroad, adding, “We would like to hope perhaps that we can be considered the same kind of ambassadors in the South.” What was more, he added, “It’s all right when we come down South to raise money for a hospital. And it’s perfectly all right when we are asked to donate our services for other humanitarian causes. They don’t call us rabblerousers then.” That may have been true, but the actors failed to get a meeting with Mayor Leslie Gilliland or any other city officials; nor were they able to talk with representatives of the Goodyear Rubber Company, whose facility was the focus of the turmoil.

A few days later Newman and Brando attended a rally at the Apollo
Theater in Harlem to raise funds for the march on Washington, and then they flew to D.C., where a modest Hollywood contingent was lost in a sea of more than a quarter of a million souls. He didn’t think they’d accomplished very much in Gadsden—“We were wasting our time,” he sighed (not to mention alienating southern theater owners, some of whom boycotted his films for a time). But of the march on Washington he rightly felt otherwise. “I’m proud I was there. There’s never been anything like it.”

J
UST AS
he was becoming more active politically, he had taken a proprietary interest in the Actors Studio, to which he would occasionally return for long, restorative spells of sitting, watching, and talking. By 1962, in the view of many of the people most intimately associated with it, the Studio had lost some of its impetus and centrality as a font of new theatrical talent. It was still a temple of acting, in a sense—where else could you see a star of Newman’s stature workshop a scene from
The Taming of the Shrew
and then listen in as the likes of Lee Strasberg told him what was right (or more often wrong) about his performance? But it had lost the semireligious aura it had once had, and Newman wasn’t alone in thinking that it had become more of a vocational institution than a spiritual one.