Paul Newman (23 page)

At the studio, during rehearsals for the film, Newman was visited by his old nemesis, Jack Warner, and he couldn’t resist giving him the needle. “I said, ‘How are ya?’” he recalled.

The name of Lew Archer was changed in part at Newman’s suggestion (he had done some rewriting of Goldman’s work on a boozy flight from England to New York), and the film was eventually retitled after the new name,
Harper;
the H was meant to echo the titles of
The Hustler
and
Hud.
And whether the luck came from the new name or from his stumbling onto a good script, he was in luck; it was his best picture and most natural performance in years.

Compared to the struggles he had forced himself through for other roles, preparation for this one was a breeze: “I just got drunk.” He stole a bit of physical business, he said, from Robert F. Kennedy, who had a habit of standing beside people and looking away from them with his head tilted when listening to them. It was a weird sort of engaged nonengagement, and it fit the character beautifully. The script was filled with California types, some depraved (particularly the characters played by Strother Martin, Lauren Bacall, and Shelley Winters) and some all-American (those portrayed by Robert Wagner, Arthur Hiller, and Pamela Tiffin). It was a completely breezy entertainment with a slick patina of modern sophistication, evoking comparisons with the films of Humphrey Bogart, the cinema’s exemplary roguish private eye. A lot of director Jack Smight’s work was perfunctory, but there was an undeniable cool to the film, and the plot was just lurid and twisty enough to create chatter.

The reviews were admiring—to a point. It was fun, most critics
conceded, but it was sloppy. “Smight is a bungler from start to finish,” carped Pauline Kael in
The New Yorker
, adding that the film featured Newman’s worst performance since
The Silver Chalice.
In the
New York Times
, Bosley Crowther was kinder to both men, comparing Smight’s work to Howard Hawks’s and suggesting that Newman made too much of a smoothie of his private eye.
*
But it was a hit, Newman’s first since
Hud
, and it marked his return, after a year’s absence, to the top ten in the annual exhibitors’ poll of top box office stars.

He jumped from one classic Hollywood genre to another, agreeing in the fall of 1965 to star in Alfred Hitchcock’s latest film,
Torn Curtain
, opposite, of all people, Julie Andrews. In a script by Canadian novelist Brian Moore, Newman would play an American physicist who pretends to defect to East Germany so as to pry information from Communist scientists and help the United States build a missile system. Andrews was cast as his assistant and fiancée, who at first knew nothing of his plot but would become enmeshed in it, imperiling both of their lives.

Hitchcock was, at age sixty-six, nearing the end of his productive years. He had just made the commercial flop
Marnie
, which would go years before enjoying a revival in the estimation of critics, and he was becoming less patient with the process of making movies. Conceiving them, writing them, planning them: that was his game. As Andrews later recalled, “The first day of production, he announced that for him the fun was over—the creative part was finished with the script and storyboard preparation—and now, he said, the rest was a bore. You can imagine how that made us feel.”

But Newman’s trepidations about the film predated that first day. He had visited Hitchcock’s offices to discuss the project before agreeing to make it, and he found that the director didn’t have a finished script to share with him. “I know you should have script approval and
everything else,” Newman remembered being told, “but I don’t want to show you the script we’ve got now because it’s not very good.”

With filming imminent, Newman had to forgo his usual rehearsal period because he took a terrible spill on one of his motorcycles, skidding out on Sunset Boulevard and suffering burns on his legs and, more severely, on his left hand, where skin grafts were required on four fingers. “At first the doctors told me that I would never have the full use of my left hand again,” he remembered. “They suggested that I should practice by gripping a tennis ball but instead I took a wet towel and wrung it all day. In the mornings my hand would have frozen and the towel would be as thick as a man’s arm, but by the evening I would get it squeezed so dry that my fist was nearly locked tight.”
*
He’d been wearing a helmet, for which he was grateful, and he got rid of all his motorcycles the next day.

But he hadn’t given the script the attention he felt it needed. When he finally did show up for filming, he was unhappy. “I never felt comfortable with the script,” he said. He drafted a memo for Hitchcock with questions about the character and the logic of the action, and he delivered it on a day when the director was receiving the magazine journalist and future filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. Hitchcock, Bogdanovich recalled, was

They went ahead with what they had, and Hitchcock managed a couple of thrilling scenes, particularly the one in which Newman and a woman have to kill an East German spy silently so as not to draw the attention of a taxi driver who’s standing just outside the house. But Hitchcock was never happy with his stars, recalled Brian Moore. “He just lost his heart during the shooting,” he said. “He discovered that they didn’t fit the Hitchcock mold or the Hitchcock method. He just couldn’t get a chemistry going with them, and he got very depressed and just went through the motions.”

On the actual set, Newman recalled, Hitchcock was always a gentle-man. “I think he treats actors with decency and respect,” he said at the time, and he remembered later, “Hitchcock was very good to me.” At the same time, Hitchcock was a master of publicity who knew that he could capture the imagination of the public by hinting that there had been friction on the set. “I always say,” he told the
New York Times
upon the film’s release, “that the most difficult things to photograph are dogs, babies, motorboats, Charles Laughton (God rest his soul) and Method actors.”

His efforts to draw attention didn’t change a thing. The picture was judged more or less a flop, both artistically and commercially—a real disappointment considering the great names involved. “There is a distracted air about much of the film,” wrote Richard Schickel in
Life
, “as if the master were not really paying attention to what he was doing.” And Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
labeled it flatly “a pathetically undistinguished spy picture.”

I
T WASN’T
long before Newman put the experience behind him by diving into yet another genre film, his third in a year. This one was a western that Martin Ritt and Irving Ravetch were producing out of a 1961 novel called
Hombre
by a writer named Elmore Leonard. Newman had an intriguing role that asked him at once to create an exotic persona and to inhabit it in a familiar American skin. John Russell is a white man who was raised in part by Apaches and in part by a rich Anglo who has died and left him a legacy. Cashing in his inheritance, Russell boards a stagecoach with a motley band of travelers who are set
upon by thieves and left to fend for themselves in the desert. Russell, raised partly in the wild, is the only one among them with any chance to survive the ordeal, so even though the group can’t abide him, they’re forced to play by his rules.

Newman liked to say that he found the key to the character when he drove past a general store near an Indian reservation in Arizona and saw a man standing stock-still in the shade on its porch; a few hours later, when he drove back to his hotel, he saw the same man standing in the exact same spot in the exact same position. That stillness would, in his mind, become the patient, calculating, diffident, dangerous essence of John Russell.

Once again James Wong Howe was shooting the picture for Ritt, and a great cast was rounded up: Fredric March as a corrupt Indian agent, Barbara Rush as his wife, Richard Boone as the leader of the bad guys, Diane Cilento as the savvy woman of the West whose life has been upended by Russell’s inheritance, and Martin Balsam as the Mexican stagecoach driver who maintains a friendship with Russell even when the latter is living among the Apaches.

But there were delays. Some could have been foreseen, such as the difficulty of working with the herd of horses that Russell, wearing the long dark bangs of an Apache, manages to corral from the wild in the opening sequence. Then Newman got the flu, missing work for virtually the only time in his life. And then unseasonable rainstorms struck the Tucson set for days.

Newman spent part of the time playing tennis. He drank. And he engaged in bawdy humor with Balsam. “We had to wait hours for the wind to let up one day,” he remembered. “To kill the time, we decided to classify fucking. We got all the psychological classifications. There was sport fucking. There was mercy fucking, which would be reserved for spinsters and librarians. There was the hate fuck, the prestige fuck, and the medicinal fuck, which is ‘Feel better now, sweetie?’ It just goes to show you what happens when you’re stuck on location on the top of a mountain. Your mind wanders slightly.”

They were making a good picture, as it happened, a real grown-up story with beautiful photography, an engaging plot, and some fine performances. In ways it was a straightforward genre western, but Newman’s
eerie stoniness in the center gave it an air of modernity and menace. John Russell was a character who would have been on the periphery of other films
—Stagecoach
, say, which surely inspired some aspects of Leonard’s novel. But placed at the center here, and embodied with thoroughly convincing coldness and steel by Newman, he quietly makes the case that the history of the Old West has been miscalculated—at least on-screen. In his political life, Newman could sometimes misstep by insisting too hard on his point of view; here, playing a man who in his very being was an argument for more equitable treatment of Native Americans, he was persuasively eloquent in his silence, sternness, and courage.

Hombre
succeeded modestly at the box office, but it was well regarded. Not that Newman necessarily took such things to heart. In fact, he had come to feel a sense of diminishing returns from his film work. He was as successful as he’d ever been, but he was bored.

A combination of events within and beyond his grasp would, however, change that—and quickly.

“I
SEEM TO PLAY THE CHILD OF OUR TIME,” HE TOLD A REPORTER
, and it was a canny insight.

Since the dawn of the 1960s, from
The Hustler
on, he had steadily built a screen persona that had a distinct American quality like, say, Fonda’s or Gable’s but that also included nuances that hadn’t often been seen in movie heroes before Brando and Dean: vulnerability, weakness, a hedonistic streak, and a full dose of antiauthoritarian cockiness and cynicism—traits an older generation of stars and audiences would have ascribed to youth.

The twist was that Newman played not kids but grown-ups—more specifically, grown-ups who hadn’t yet outgrown juvenile impulses, urges, and flaws and might never do so. As he portrayed them, Fast Eddie Felson, Chance Wayne, Hud Bannon, and Lew Harper (and in the coming years, Cool Hand Luke Jackson and Butch Cassidy) were grown-up rebels who felt kindred to a young audience getting ready to shake off traditional American paternalism forever. Despite each being a singular personality, they combined to form an echt 1960s type that Newman epitomized; indeed, part of what made those characters so emblematic of their era was the easy swagger and ridiculous charm with which he filled them. He was becoming the most popular actor in movies because he and his roles seemed so au courant and apt.

What was especially interesting in his assessment, though, was the use of the word
child
to describe his roles and, by extension, at least a little bit, himself. Somehow he had frozen time around him or, rather, in
him. Movie stars didn’t age like other people, but Newman didn’t age like other movie stars. In his early forties he could seem half that old.

For one thing, he was in ridiculously good shape. He ran and rode a bike and saunaed and swam virtually every day, and he ate sparingly and smartly: steaks and soup and fruit and burgers and salads and buckets of popcorn. He had a flat stomach, a small waist, no hips, muscled arms—all on top of legs so thin that even he had to laugh at them. (“Old skinny legs,” his kids would call him.) He wasn’t a fanatic for fitness: he smoked, and he was constantly trying to quit by chewing gum or munching on celery stalks and carrots. And he drank: beer after beer after beer—a case or more a day, people said, often followed by the hard stuff, scotch mainly. Friends and colleagues and journalists and oglers would talk about him drinking beers on the set, in his office, at parties, during interviews, while watching TV, getting ready for dinner, relaxing after dinner; Mort Sahl recalled him filling a brandy snifter with ice and scotch and sipping it as he sat in a steam room; Newman himself joked about drinking even in bed. But he metabolized it or burned it up almost entirely. There wasn’t a pint of fat on him, it seemed. He was famous for his lean, bright, spry, and confident face (dunked in ice water each morning, they said, just as he did at the beginning of
Harper
) and for those blue eyes, which maintained their uncanny color, it was whispered, with the help of imported French eye drops. And he still had a full head of curly hair. (He had a theory about this: he’d favored a brush cut as a boy, he said, but no one else in the family did. “My father, my uncle, and my brother became bald. I would have, too, except that I kept the short Germanic haircut and, from the time I was eleven to my mid-twenties, I brushed my hair every day with a stiff brush.”) He had all the appearances of youthful perfection, but also the internal wisdom and self-awareness of mature age and, more, canniness and irony—in all, a devastating combination. Josh Logan was no doubt right when he declared that the soft-featured Botticelli angel of 1954 carried no sexual threat; the Paul Newman of 1967, on the other hand, not only carried it but
defined
it.

And perhaps because he stayed so attractive, he seemed youthful even as the years rolled by underneath him. “He got to be twenty-nine years old,” said Joanne, “and then he stayed twenty-nine years
old year after year after year, while I got older and older and older.” That was something of a joke, but it was one of those jokes that revealed a truth and, perhaps, a painful one, if not for her then certainly for Newman’s son. Scott was nearing his seventeenth birthday, and his relationship with his parents and stepmother was becoming strained; he had no particular aptitude for school, and he was starting to run with a dodgy crowd—when, in fact, he was in a crowd at all. At the same time, his father was considered a hot number not only by women of his own age but by girls of his son’s age. Every boy grows up in his father’s shadow but can look to the passage of time as an inevitable leveler of the field, a promise of liberation; for Scott, Newman’s seemingly perpetual youth must have seemed instead a challenge and a taunt.

Joanne too could see her husband’s boyishness as a threat. She herself would not turn forty until 1970, but she had already reached the age when Hollywood actresses can’t get the parts that producers give to pretty girls. She had given birth to three daughters and was recovering her figure through the pursuit of ballet as a form of exercise. And she—along with the rest of the family, true, but she most of all—had to watch in silence as women walked up to her husband in public places or at parties and literally threw themselves at him or went knock-kneed (again, literally) at the very sight of him. She had a sense of humor about the situation—“He’s forty-four, has six children, and snores; how can he be a teenage sex symbol?”—and the ability to make him snap to attention when she demanded it. But it was an absurd burden to place on top of the burden of being married to a famous man. Every wife of a celebrity must endure intrusions, of course, but being married to a sex symbol was its own brand of punishment.

Professionally, Newman’s agelessness made him a unique item in Hollywood. He had all-American qualities, but he played against them as if he hadn’t yet grown into them, and that coltishness, combined with an appearance that resembled the ideal of Greek and Roman artists, meant that he could convincingly play characters who were significantly younger than his actual years. And it meant that audiences—male and female, young and old—would accept him in those roles and
that he could become iconic in them in a fashion that no amount of studio publicity could manufacture. He had achieved a balance of Old Hollywood, with its polish and glamour and confidence and agreeable slickness, and New, with its roguishness, daring, and defiance. And if he had just the right project in front of him, he could make films that stood among the best of both epochs.

H
E BEGAN
making one in the fall of 1966, when he spent some time in West Virginia absorbing the atmosphere of small-town Appalachia and studying the ways in which the men in such places walked, spoke, and held their bodies. He had been cast in a new film being made by Jack Lemmon’s Jalem Productions from a novel by Donn Pearce, a merchant seaman who became a counterfeiter and then a safecracker before writing about his experiences on a chain gang in a book called
Cool Hand Luke.
The film would mark the American theatrical debut of director Stuart Rosenberg, who’d been working in television for more than a decade and had, curiously, made a film in Berlin in 1961 about religious persecution. Rosenberg had actually discovered Pearce’s book and brought it to Jalem, which hired Pearce to do the first pass at adapting it for the screen. But not only had Pearce never written a film, he had no idea what a script even looked like. And when his draft came in, another writer, Frank R. Pierson, was called in to recraft it.

There had been some thought of Lemmon himself playing the title character, Lucas Jackson, an incorrigible southern bad boy who gets arrested for a dumb crime (drunkenly wrenching off the heads of parking meters) and winds up in a prison work camp, where his increasing defiance of authority, logic, and even self-preservation makes him a target for sadistic jailers and a legend among his prison mates. For a while there was thought of offering it to Telly Savalas, who was stuck in England making
The Dirty Dozen.
But Newman heard about the project and asked in, even before the script was settled. “It’s one of the few roles I committed myself to on the basis of the original book, without seeing a script,” he recalled. “It would have worked no matter how many mistakes were made.” It had elements that were irresistible
to him and would fit him perfectly: boozy prankishness, gutsy nonconformity, physical endurance and prowess, bawdy humor, and a humanistic message that indicted the penal system (and by extension modern society) for squashing anything that resembled free thought.

He went off to West Virginia to do his research, talking to various locals, recording their accents, and quizzing them about their attitudes. He stayed in Huntington, causing ruckuses in nearby bakeries, country clubs, and taverns when he stepped in for a bite or a drink; at a Catholic high school he was introduced to a nun, who shook his hand and said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Newman. What do you do for a living?”

While he developed his character, production ramped up in Stockton, California, which would stand in for an unnamed southern state in the film. The producers shipped tons of Spanish moss to the location and built a prison camp so realistic that a county building inspector passing by on his rounds mistook it for migrant worker housing and ordered it condemned for code violations. The cast who would inhabit that temporary prison with Newman was a motley crew of hemen: George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Wayne Rogers, Ralph Waite, Anthony Zerbe, and Donn Pearce himself. Lording over them were Strother Martin, as the warden, and Morgan Woodward, who stood out from the pack of guards because of his reflecting sunglasses and stony silence. There was a key female role—Luke’s mother, who comes to visit the prison one bittersweet day—and when Bette Davis passed on it, it went to Jo Van Fleet.
*
Conrad Hall, who had shot
Harper
, was the cinematographer. And there was a new face among the lower-level production executives on the picture: Arthur S. Newman Jr.

Since his father’s death more than a decade before, Art Jr. had bounced around in a number of sales and management jobs in the auto mobile business, including stints with General Motors and various
auto parts manufacturers and dealers. He had married, and that wasn’t going well, and he was sufficiently unsettled that he was able to move to California when his kid brother formed a film company and needed help in the number-crunching and quality-control sides of the business. Newman didn’t have any stake in the production of
Cool Hand Luke
, but it would be an excellent opportunity for Art to learn the ins and outs of the movie biz at the very rarefied level on which Newman operated. Art would get credit as unit manager, one of those guys who stands around a film set making sure things got done on time and within the budget: a good job.

People would often be startled by the very sight of Art, who shared his brother’s coloring—even the eyes—and a great many other details of his appearance. He was, said a writer in
The Saturday Evening Post
, “a larger and more heavily built version [of Newman]…a man whose features were roughly the same but had been assembled slightly differently.” He distinguished himself—and hid the baldness that his brother had evaded—by wearing hats; at the time he was fond of old-fashioned newsboy caps, including a garish black-and-white-checked number. Newman used to kid Art mercilessly about those hats, but he was genuinely glad to have him around, if for no other reason than that Art was perhaps the only person whom Newman would fully trust when it came to matters of money. So just like that, another generation of Newman brothers was in business.

M
ONEY WAS
much on Newman’s mind. He once tallied up how many people he was supporting—wife, ex-wife, kids, mother, employees—and the number was in the dozens: staggering. He was nearing the absolute ceiling for Hollywood salaries, and yet he couldn’t seem to parlay his success into real wealth. “I’ve never been able to make the kind of investments that people think I have,” he told a reporter. “I have money, but it seems to go out quicker than it comes in.” He lived well, yes, and he had money for charities—as much as $100,000 annually through his No Sutch Foundation and in 1967 $50,000 to Yale to help institute a permanent repertory theater there. But personal wealth, which he had long disdained as a goal in life, was increasingly
important to him. In March 1966 he started to seek new ways to secure his finances, buying the 3,950-acre Indian Creek Ranch near San Luis Obispo as an investment. He began to restructure his film concerns.
Hombre
would be the last film he made with Martin Ritt either as a director or in some production capacity; he would instead spend 1967 forming a company with his own agent, John Foreman, who would leave the representation business to form the Newman-Foreman Company, to produce films both starring Newman and not.

He also became a partner in a West Hollywood nightclub called the Factory, which wasn’t so odd a thing as it sounded. The mid-1960s were a transitional time in Hollywood nightlife. Old-style supper clubs like Ciro’s and Slapsie Maxie’s and Mocambo had closed or been converted to youth-oriented rock clubs or been replaced by a chic new style of night spot modeled on such French and English discothèques as Regine’s or the Ad Lib. The only venue in Southern California that combined the new nightclub style with the classic veneer of high showbiz was the Daisy, a private club in Beverly Hills where you could see Frank Sinatra frugging with Mia Farrow or Cary Grant enjoying a night out with Dyan Cannon. Newman was a member at the Daisy, and he liked to shoot pool there, even though it carried risks: there was only one table, which meant that you always had a crowd watching. He loved to tell the story of the night he played a couple of games of eight ball on that table and was approached by a guy who’d been looking on and who declared, “Mr. Newman, I just want to tell you that I saw
The Hustler
three times and it was one helluva movie. I watched you play pool tonight, and it was one of the biggest disappointments of my life.”