Paul Newman (22 page)

An idea for rejuvenating the Studio (and incidentally securing its always-shaky finances for the long term) was promoted by Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. They thought that the Actors Studio could form its own theatrical company, presenting new plays and revisiting established works, bringing back a touch of the old Group Theater days and providing a basis for American stage acting akin to that provided English actors by such troupes as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. The plan that they and others devised was to create a Production Unit within the Studio that, separate from the workshop sessions, would develop plays and present them on or off Broadway. Various committees were formed (Newman served on several), and the sort of heated debate typical of the more radical past of many of the members ensued. There was fallout—among others, Elia Kazan
decided to separate himself from the Studio altogether, declaring, “I wouldn’t sit on a committee with Jesus Christ, never mind Stanislavsky, and you can quote me!”

In April 1962 the plan to present productions was announced in the press; the following March the Actors Studio Theater presented its premiere work, Eugene O’Neill’s
Strange Interlude
, starring Geraldine Page and Ben Gazzara. And soon after that plans for a new play, the Studio’s fourth production, were announced: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in
Baby Want a Kiss
, an original work by their old friend James Costigan.

“Lee was so happy that Paul, the big star, wanted to do it,” remembered Geraldine Page. “Lee said, ‘Paul has a play he wants to do; if we do it, he’ll bring in some money.’” But others in the Studio had suspicions about the quality of the material. Costigan had written a one-act comedy about a pair of Hollywood stars (the Newmans) visiting with a reclusive writer friend (Costigan himself) in his remote country home, where his only companions were a parakeet and a sheepdog; over the course of a drunken evening, the three would reveal their darkest fantasies and desires. It was a quirky piece, with elements of absurdism and caustic commentary about the nature of celebrity and glamour. But it was short, so a curtain-raiser would be required; Costigan’s
The Census Taker
, a two-hander, also to be played by the Newmans, was selected.

The Newmans agreed to premiere the show in the spring of 1964 and stay with it for four months, earning only Equity minimum—$117.50 a week each—for their work (big-name performers in other Actors Studio Theater productions commanded as much as $1,000 a week). And Newman did a tremendous job of publicizing the show, explaining the importance of the Actors Studio in his own professional development and of the liberating sensation of appearing on Broadway for a strictly limited engagement. “You get the luxury of developing a part for three months,” he explained. “After four months it becomes a bore. You’re working for real estate men and the play’s backers. You’re not satisfying the needs of an actor.”

He was, according to Frank Corsaro, who directed the play, an exemplary collaborator. “Paul bent over backward,” he said, “not to tread on toes, not to exert power, which he could easily have done.” In the
year between announcing the production and the first rehearsals, Costigan expanded
Baby Want a Kiss
into a full play, and the curtain-raiser was dropped. But there were still difficulties with the material, which was fantastical and strange and hard to describe. “It’s an Irish fairy tale,” Newman told a reporter while taking a break from rehearsals, “a theoretical comedy about the contradiction and ambivalence of friendship, of any relationship. It’s a difficult script, full of non sequiturs.” Joanne agreed: “We went home from the first readings exhausted. Right after dinner we’d disappear into the steam room and
memorize.”
She described the characters they would be playing as “an aging juvenile” and “a fading ingénue,” adding with a chuckle, “Ourselves, no doubt.”

After a few delays the play opened on the night of April 19, 1964—and it landed on the stage of the Little Theater like a soggy sponge. “What is it?” began Howard Taubman’s review in the
New York Times
, praising the Newmans’ performances before answering his own question with “a self-conscious, pretentious exercise in futility.” Walter Kerr, writing in the
New York Herald-Tribune
, pronounced, “The play cannot find a firm, formal, satirical world in which it can make itself comfortable.”
Time
declared that it was “better at cracking wise than being wise.” And
The Saturday Review
sniffed that it was “closer to being a parody of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
than it is to being its successor.” (Even its most ardent partisans had to admit the truth: as Strasberg conceded, “A fantasy element in the play… didn’t come across in the production,” and Corsaro agreed, saying, “It exemplified a fallacious side of the Studio.”)

Despite the poor notices, the play was a tremendous hit, selling out virtually every performance in an eighteen-week run and earning a $150,000 profit on the initial $25,000 investment. That was a real shot in the arm, considering how poorly other Actors Studio Theater productions fared:
Strange Interlude
had gotten wonderful reviews, for instance, but was believed to have lost some $60,000; likewise James Baldwin’s original play
Blues for Mister Charlie
, which opened just after
Baby
and was well received by the critics, also closed at a financial loss. Later that year the Studio made a heroic effort to reverse its fortunes by sending its highly regarded production of Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
to London (a trip in part subsidized by Newman); but there were many
changes in the cast, and the show was savaged by the English critics and flopped commercially. And with that debacle the dream of the Actors Studio Theater finally died.

N
EWMAN WAS
luckier in politics. While still onstage with
Baby
, he took an active role in the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Just prior to the main event, he cohosted a barbecue fund-raiser in honor of Lynda Bird Johnson, the president’s daughter, at the Henry Ford estate in Water Mill, Long Island, and had a hair-raising adventure trying to get back to Manhattan for the evening’s performance: the seaplane that was supposed to get him back to the city never showed up, and he wound up having to hire a small plane at the Easthampton air field to take him to the Marine Terminal near LaGuardia. During the convention he served as master of ceremonies at a fifty-sixth birthday party for the president. He created a small personal fund, the No Sutch Foundation, and used it to donate to various political causes, chiefly civil rights groups but also to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think tank based in Santa Barbara where he occasionally attended seminars, panel discussions, and lectures with a determination that he had rarely demonstrated back at Kenyon College. “I feel like an ass going up to these seminars,” he admitted, “but I tell you, it is so refreshing to focus my mind on something.”

Maybe so, but a lot of his free time was given over to less grave pursuits. When he was in New York, he enjoyed getting around town on a motor scooter—“The only way to get through mid-town traffic,” he swore. In Los Angeles and Connecticut he spent a couple of years and a not-inconsequential sum of money souping up Volkswagen Beetles with Porsche engines and racing suspensions. “This is such a discreet car,” he explained, demonstrating one to a reporter. “You don’t have people pulling alongside and waving at you.” Some of his other souped-up sleds weren’t so understated: “I also owned one Beetle that had a 351 Ford V8,” he said. “It was really hairy. Great in a straight line, but, boy, it never did the same thing twice.” He relished the reaction he got out of people when they did recognize him in what looked
like a beater car and then he tore away from them at startling speed. He also acquired a small collection of motorcycles and would relax after a long day on the movie set by tearing out of his rented Hollywood homes. “Having that old brute bike on the front porch and driving it to the beach after dinner is marvelous,” he said. “Within minutes you’re looser.”

A
ND HE
wasn’t fidgety only in his life; in his work he seemed restless too.

Before going onstage with
Baby
, he filmed an ill-conceived remake of
Rashomon
written by Michael Kanin and directed by Martin Ritt. It was set in the Old West, and Newman played the Toshiro Mifune role, which had been transformed into a bandit named Carrasco whose encounter with a prosperous Anglo couple in the desert begins as a robbery and then goes on to rape, perhaps, and murder, perhaps—depending, as in the original, on which version of the events you trust.

They couldn’t find a name for it at first. The studio had quite naturally balked at
The Rape
, and when they shot it near Tucson and back in Hollywood, they were calling it
Judgment in the Sun.
Eventually it was called
The Outrage
, which was overselling its impact some. Despite the reteaming of the star, director, and even cinematographer of
Hud
, despite the casting of Laurence Harvey and Claire Bloom as the other players in the inscrutable triangle of theft, sex, and death, the film was tepid and altogether unconvincing.

Newman was as weak as he’d been in a drama in years, sneering and snorting and casting droopy-eyed gazes and leers from underneath a mop of straight brown hair and a dark line of goatee. The film was shot in black and white, which was good, because Newman wasn’t able to do anything about the color of his eyes. “I tried brown contacts,” he explained, “but my eyes are very sensitive. We were doing a screen test …I stood in front of the camera and all you had was this weeping Mexican.” He was drawn to the role, he said, “because I had never played a primitive” (although, to be honest, Rocky Graziano was awfully close). And he traveled to find the skin of the part. “A friend and I went down to Mexico for two weeks. We got the accent from a soup
salesman and the voice quality from a bellhop, over
mucho cerveza.”
But it all just seemed like a bad Anthony Quinn impression. And the reimagining of
Rashomon
convinced nobody.

He traveled again, both literally and within his craft, to make
Lady L
, which Peter Ustinov had written and was directing from Romain Gary’s novel, about a woman who rises from a Paris brothel to become the dame of a fine English estate by riding a wave of sex and skullduggery propelled by anarchists, policemen, a pianist, and a titled eccentric. It shot in London, Paris, and Nice in the fall and winter of 1964–65, and Joanne and her daughters came along, joined, for a period, by Newman’s older children.

As when they made
Paris Blues
, they rented a house in Montmartre. And as then, Joanne was pregnant. But this time she wasn’t Newman’s leading lady; Sophia Loren was, and, Gore Vidal recalled, “Joanne always suspected the worst.” Vidal and she would try to get Newman to describe his unimaginably glamorous and sexy costar, and he would shrug and say things like “Well, she was late for work this morning.” His evasiveness was almost like a tease.

One night the Newmans and Loren went out together to a fine restaurant, and the difference between the international sexpot and the serious actors with the houseful of kids in Connecticut was starkly evident. As Newman remembered, “She threw her sable across her shoulders and swept right through like the Queen of Romania, while Joanne and I were trying to enter the restaurant through the woodwork. Crabwise, you know? Skulking behind the headwaiter. I’ll never forget that! I mean, [she] was not in the least uncomfortable about the attention she drew, while Joanne and I were.” Ustinov, no doubt acutely aware of distinctions such as these, felt that Joanne had nothing to fear. In admiration of the Newmans’ marriage, he declared, “They are one of the very few couples who are privileged to be in love, and because they love and quarrel occasionally, they can afford to be quite brash about each other. They have shut the window against the drafts of difference.”

So much for
that
drama. On the set Newman was trying his hand at a new sort of role, an easily impassioned French bomb-thrower who treated his woman with macho entitlement and devoted his heart to his politics, someone pitched between Ari from
Exodus
and the modern
painter from
What a Way to Go!
He fought the studio for the right to wear a mustache for the role—“I couldn’t find one photograph of an anarchist without a mustache,” he explained—and so he considered it a stretch of his acting chops. But the script provided him with hardly anything interesting to do, and he saw in the film’s failure not the flaws in the script or the froufy treatment but his own inability to extend his range. “That film made me aware that I am stuck in an American skin,” he said. “I doubt that I’ll ever play a foreigner again.” (Good to his word, he never would.)

H
IS NEXT
role would mine a distinctly American vein indeed: Lew Archer, the hero of Ross Macdonald’s wonderful series of detective novels that had sustained the hard-boiled private eye tradition after the careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
The Moving Target
, written in 1949, was the debut Archer novel and would be the first one anyone filmed; screenwriter William Goldman had updated it—but only slightly—with the proper lacings of sauce and sizzle. Frank Sinatra had turned it down, which didn’t mean much; the role was perfect for Newman. But for one thing: the picture would be made at Warner Bros., the studio he had left so angrily six years earlier. This time, though, he would be paid even more than the princely half-million dollars he once paid Jack Warner to release him from his contract; he could afford to let bygones be bygones. “A feud should live a full and colorful life,” he told a reporter, “and then it should die a natural death and be forgotten.”

Before going to California for the shoot, Newman stopped back east long enough to celebrate his fortieth birthday with friends at a party thrown by Gore Vidal. (Barbra Streisand was in attendance, and it was, Vidal remembered, the first time she’d ever tried caviar.) In April, Joanne delivered another girl, Claire Olivia, who would always be known as Clea. And then the family made their way to another rented Hollywood home.