Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (69 page)

Newman had no objection to playing gay. As a liberal, he’d always taken a stand for homosexual rights, asserting “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve never been able to understand attacks on the gay community.”

Stevens refashioned the script, shifting the plot from repressed homosexual intrigue into more of a surrogate father-son drama, muting the Freudian subtext. Billy the Kid is depicted as “half boy, half man,” who eventually interprets rancher Tunstall (as played by Colin Keith-Johnson) as a father figure. The half man part of Newman’s character gets to deliver “the cojones” line of the movie: “I don’t run. I don’t hide. I go where I want. I do what I want.”

Jokingly, Newman nicknamed Steven’s script
The Left Handed Jockstrap
.

Penn later claimed that Newman “Method acted his way through the entire film.” At one point, Newman curls up into a ball on the floor, a scene and an acting style that Penn interpreted as “pure James Dean.”

“Through it all,” Newman told Coe, “I feel Dean could have done a better job than me in this film. The thought is driving me crazy. Tonight, I’ll have to have six extra beers.”

Although Gore didn’t like the revised script, he did compliment Penn for being an experimental director, creating a black-and-white movie that was cutting-edge, at one point employing slow motion and vision blur in a death scene.

In its bastardized, watered-down version, with bad editing,
The Left Handed Gun
opened in New York City on May 7, 1958, to disappointing box office.

Film critics were waiting with poison pens. The reviews were devastating, as New York writers didn’t know what to make of “these television boys venturing into feature films.” The reference was to Fred Coe and Arthur Penn. “Poor Mr. Newman,” wrote Howard Thompson in
The New York Times
. “He seems to be auditioning alternately for the Moscow Arts Theater and Grand Old Opry, as he ambles about, grinning and mumbling endlessly.”

One radio reviewer was particularly venomous. “For this type of role,” he asserted over the air, “we need to resurrect James Dean from his grave. Maybe Marlon Brando could have pulled it off, certainly not little Paul Newman. A midget off screen, a midget on screen.”

To the regret of both Gore and Newman, there was a critical backlash and a lot more unfavorable comparisons of the Newman interpretation to the acting of James Dean. As one critic wrote, “It’s almost as if Newman is working at an excess of James Dean. That wouldn’t be surprising, since the screenplay’s Billy comes across as more misunderstood youth than cold-blooded killer.”

Some reviewers regretted that the heroic soldier and World War II hero, Audie Murphy, didn’t get to play Billy. “Visually, he would be perfect, and a better choice than Newman. Plus, surprisingly for Murphy’s boyish appearance, he could do a killer-stare to make you believe he killed 100 Nazis in the war.”
[Ironically, the critic who wrote that did not know that Murphy had already played Billy the Kid in the 1950 movie
, The Kid from Texas,
in which he gave a lack-luster performance.]

Not every critic attacked the film. Writing for
Time Out
, Tom Milne defined it as, “A key stage in the development of the Western.” Also, based on favorable reviews and relatively robust box office in Paris, the French public appreciated the film more than their American counterparts.

In spite of its initial box office failure, Newman, in later years, spoke kindly about the film, calling it “way ahead of its time and still a classic in France.” Gore himself continued to be disappointed at the way his script had been butchered and rewritten. He called it “a movie that only someone like the French could praise.”

Even though he and Newman remained friends, Gore still expressed his resentment of the way the actor handled the film, as stated in his autobiography,
Palimpsest
. “Paul, no tower of strength in these matters, allowed the hijacking to take place.” He was referring to Penn’s ordering a rewrite of his script, as Newman stood by, not uttering a word of protest.

Ironically, in the dismal aftermath of Newman’s second attempt to play Billy, Marlon Brando would star in
One-Eyed Jacks
in 1961, his character also based on the notorious Kid.
[Conceived and directed by Brando himself, it’s a commercial and artistic failure, breathtakingly long and breathtakingly over budget.]

“The Mark of Zorro is indeed on me,” Newman said upon seeing
One-Eyed Jacks
. “I can’t escape the curse of Brando. My wife even had to go make a film with him. Don’t get me wrong, I love Brando dearly. When he calls me, I come running. Even after all this time, I still find him mesmerizing. But there are times on a bad hair day when I think I will always live in his shadow.”

Arthur Penn once said, “Someday, film historians will have to judge
The Left Handed Gun
on its own merits.”

That judgment came down in 2004, when film critic David Thomson wrote of Newman’s portrait of Billy the Kid as “the intellectual’s noble savage.”

Otherwise, Thomson was devastatingly skeptical of Newman’s “blue-eyed likability. He seems to me an uneasy, self-regarding personality, as if handsomeness had left him guilty. As a result, he was more mannered than Brando when young, while his smirking good humor always seemed more appropriate to glossy advertisements than to good movies.”

Sometime during the 1970s, John Calley became head of production at Warners. He’d been intrigued by the critical reappraisals of
The Left Handed Gun
, particularly Penn’s own assessment that if his original version had not been edited so poorly,
The Left Handed Gun
would rank right up there with Gary Cooper’s
High Noon
(1952).

Consequently, Calley called Penn and asked him to re-edit
The Left Handed Gun
into the original version he had wanted. But when a search was made in the archives at Warners, it was discovered that the unused footage had been junked.

Meanwhile, Hollywood’s fascination for heroic
[or anti-heroic]
sagas about the American West continued. In 1989, Val Kilmer would star in an all-new interpretation entitled
Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid
. Of the fifty or so films made about the life of this psychotic gunslinger, Kilmer’s was the most accurate in adhering to the actual events in The Kid’s life—a greater, more artful, and more historically accurate depiction than either of Newman’s previous interpretations on television and on the big screen.

Turner Home Entertainment financed a made-for-TV movie based on Gore’s original concept of the outlaw.

There was much that was “authentic” in the script, including Val Kilmer’s interpretation of Billy as “a dark version of the outlaw as a heroic innocent.”

Gore had admired Kilmer’s acting in
Top Gun
(1986) alongside Tom Cruise. Gore found Kilmer “the sexier of the two.” Based on Kilmer’s previous links to both Cher and Ellen Barkin, Gore assumed that he had a taste for older women.

Gore was pleased that this later version adhered more to his original concepts, enough for him to allow producer Frank von Zerneck to bill it as
Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid
. To everyone’s regret, Americans did not flock in any numbers to see this dark, shadowy screen version, even though many critics hailed its premiere with fanfare. According to Gore: “I reworked the script, but I was pushing seventy years old. Perhaps I should have gone back to my original that I did in my twenties. In one early version I never submitted, I had a male-on-male love scene.”

There is a footnote to Gore and his fascination with Billy the Kid. It occurred in the late 1940s, a decade hailed as “The Golden Age” of ballet in America. Gore felt that ballet was significant enough in his life to devote an entire chapter to it, entitling it “Dancers: An Interval,” in his memoirs.

After the War, and at the government’s expense because of its designation as “rehabilitation,” Gore attended ballet classes taught by George Chafee in New York. He never seriously entertained the prospect of becoming a ballet dancer, but he participated in the
barre
exercises as a means of healing his arthritic knee. Along the way, he became more interested in the dancers than the technique or the dance rituals themselves.

First came his ill-fated romance with Harold Lang.

Five years older than Gore, Lang, in 1944, had played one of the three sailors in Jerome Robbins’ award-winning ballet
Fancy Free
. The other two sailors included Robbins himself and John Kriza. Two of these men would become Gore’s lovers.

The inspiration for
Fancy Free
involved the shore leaves, during World War II, of three sailors “on the town” in Manhattan. The musical score was composed by Leonard Bernstein, with scenery designed by Oliver Smith.

Gore wrote that Bernstein’s music “was a sort of marching song for all of us set free from the war.”

All three “sailors” were to become icons in the world of dance.
Fancy Free
was adapted into a Broadway musical by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. It opened on Broadway in 1944 and featured such songs as “New York, New York.” In 1949, MGM released its film adaptation, entitling it
On the Town
, starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.

Gore met Lang one night when he was appearing on Broadway in
Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’!
(1948). Slightly shorter than Gore, the California-born actor actor/dancer had a trim, muscular body and looked much the same age as Gore, although he was five years older. “He had the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen,” Gore said, “his thighs were so strong they could lock you in a death grip. His smile was that of a roguish imp. He had an engaging personality that attracted both men and women to him like hound dogs at feeding time.”

Gore wrote an unpublished short story about their first meeting “in a wood-walled bar in a beach town.” Actually, it was East Hampton on Long Island.

That night, Lang invited Gore to his boarding house, but they didn’t have sex until the dawn came. As Gore was dressing to leave, Lang said, “Let’s have a roll in the hay.” It would be the beginning of dozens of such seductions.

As the relationship deepened, Gore fancifully imagined that Lang was “like Jimmie come back to me.” That was a reference to his former lover, Jimmie Trimble, who had died during the American invasion of Iwo Jima in World War II.

“In bed with Harold, and for the first time since Jimmie, I gave as much as I got,” Gore recalled.