Authors: Shawn Levy
There were other obstacles to the production. NBC’s censors were concerned with some of the language in the script, and they hovered around the set until Coe blasted them with words stronger even than Hemingway’s. Newman continued to be anxious about the requirements of the role and the appropriateness of stepping into Dean’s shoes; Hotchner took him out to lunch to reassure him, and they were joined, at Newman’s request, by Joanne Woodward, who was back from Hollywood and her own benighted film debut, the western
Count Three and Pray.
As Hotchner later remembered, Newman spent the lunch explaining how inadequate he felt in the role (it didn’t help that he’d been told that Hemingway would be watching from Cuba); Joanne spent the meal reassuring him, “You’ll be fine.”
The Battler
aired on October 18, and it wasn’t very well received.
Life
published a photo essay revealing the transformation Newman underwent at the hands of the makeup artists, and some reviewers made a point of praising his performance (“quite effective” said the
New York Times
). But it seemed to Newman as much a detour as singing alongside Eva Marie Saint. To other eyes, though, it was a revelation.
O
NE OF
the surprise best sellers of 1955 was
Somebody Up There Likes Me: The Story of My Life So Far
, in which boxer Rocky Graziano related,
with the aid of journalist Rowland Barber, details of his life: tough times, comic misadventures, philosophies, proclivities, and triumphs. MGM had acquired the film rights early on, and an adaptation by Ernest Lehman was set to be directed by Robert Wise, who already had one top-notch boxing film,
The Set-Up
, behind him. The part of the title character—comic and feral, sensual and gritty, explosive and athletic—had been considered a prize by young Hollywood actors; among those vying for it was James Dean, who came to be seen as the favorite. Now, with Dean gone, Newman was the prime choice for the part.
Coincidentally, Newman was already being spoken about in connection with another MGM project, a film version of Rod Serling’s televised courtroom drama
The Rack
, which concerned an army captain, son of a distinguished colonel, who comes home from a Korean War POW camp to be tried on charges of colluding with the enemy. Producer Arthur M. Loew Jr. had acquired the property and asked his cousin, screenwriter Stewart Stern, to turn it into a film. Stern did fresh research on the subject of brainwashing and psychological torture and did some rewriting to accommodate the concerns of military censors. But he’d finally completed a satisfactory script, and the studio sent it to Newman so that he could consider playing the lead; after he’d read it, he replied with a three-page letter in which he asked questions about the character’s emotions and state of mind and suggested changes that he felt would punch up the tensions in the relationship of father and son.
Stern was impressed with what Newman had written. “He is the most aware and the most disciplined story-mind that I have ever come across in terms of being able to space, measure and orchestrate a script from an actor’s point of view,” he said years later. He insisted to Loew that they’d found their man. MGM boss Dore Schary agreed, and he reckoned that he could strike a better deal for Newman’s services with Warner Bros. if he got him for two pictures, so he had Robert Wise test Newman for the role of Graziano. Meanwhile he assumed Newman’s salary from Warner Bros. and, on October 29, announced that he had cast him in
The Rack.
The six weeks of filming began almost at once; Newman would be
home with Jackie and the children for only a few days during the holidays. But that would change: almost as soon as he got to Hollywood, he landed the lead in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
, and come springtime he would be working back east in one of MGM’s first location shoots in New York.
It was a windfall, but it was bittersweet. “I’m still convinced that if Jimmy had done
The Battler
, he’d have gotten the role in
Somebody Up There Likes Me,”
Newman confessed. But rather than credit his lucky streak, he found a more palpable outlet for his gratitude: “Although I’d lost most of my self-confidence, Dore Schary did more than anyone else to help me regain it.”
He determined to prove to Schary that he hadn’t made a mistake, by giving his all to the roles. In
The Rack
, most of which consisted of strained tête-à-têtes with his father (played by Walter Pidgeon) and anguished courtroom testimony, he had the biggest part of his career to date. Fortunately, the script resembled a play sufficiently for him to apply his version of Actors Studio praxis to it. The night before shooting a scene, he would record his lines in a strict monotone—just to get the words right—and then work on various interpretations and strategies for performing them. Now and again he would call Stern to test a theory he had or to ask whether it would be okay to “restate it or find a different way,” as the writer recalled. He worked like this for more or less the length of the production, and then he segued into
Somebody Up There
and the difficult job of transforming himself credibly into an Italian-American juvenile delinquent who became middleweight champion of the world.
A couple of years earlier Josh Logan had told him that he carried no sexual threat, and so Newman had applied his habitual doggedness to the problem: “The way I translated that was six hours in the gym every day,” he remembered. For
Somebody Up There
, it would pay off. He trained at Manhattan’s famed mid-town boxing mecca, Stillman’s Gym, where Graziano himself had learned the sport. The routine transformed his body from slender to muscular, so much so that he began to overestimate his athletic prowess. He was given a chance to spar with former champion Tony Zale, against whom Graziano fought in an epic trilogy of title bouts in the span of two years; when Newman started
coming on a little strong, Zale stopped toying with the actor and hit him good. As a result Zale lost the chance to play himself in the film, which had been the studio’s original plan. Zale didn’t care: “I don’t mind waltzing a little bit, but you gotta show who the boss is.”
Newman had more—and more pleasurable—contact with Graziano himself, a wily character who’d grown up as a Lower East Side truant and a reluctant soldier (he changed his name from Barbella to Graziano in order to avoid detection for deserting the army) before discovering that he could put his temper, his fierceness, and his ability to take a punch to some professional purpose. The actor and the former fighter, who had become a kind of public comedian playing a tongue-in-cheek version of a punch-drunk palooka, palled around for a couple of weeks so that Newman could observe and absorb some of his personality.
“I tried to find universal physical things that he did,” Newman recalled, “or emotional responses that he had to certain things, that would allow me to create not
the
Rocky Graziano but
a
Graziano.” They visited several key locations from the boxer’s life, and Newman cagily sized up his target.
“There were two things that I discovered about him,” he revealed. “One was that there was very little thought connected with his responses; they were immediate and emotional. Another was that there was a terrific restlessness about him, a kind of urgency and a thrust.” They hit pool halls and bars and such, and Newman found him good company and an agreeable research subject, to a point: “He didn’t want to talk about his family. So one night at the Embers, Bob Wise, the director, and I tried to get Rocky stoned so that he’d loosen up and talk about himself. The fact is that Rocky loosened
us
up. We told him
our
life stories. He poured us into two taxicabs.” If he didn’t get deep into Graziano’s soul, he picked up his vocal and physical mannerisms almost a little too well. “He spits a lot, which I do to this day,” Newman confessed a few years later. “In the middle of Fifth Avenue, walking down the street …a particular kind of hangover.”
Newman didn’t know it at the time, but he would be the second actor, in a sense, to play Graziano. A few years earlier another Method actor had hung around Stillman’s for a few weeks and watched Graziano move and talk and fight and laugh. Sometime later the actor
returned and offered the boxer a pair of tickets to a show he was appearing in on Broadway. Graziano and his wife went to the theater, and as he sat watching the performance, he had the most amazing revelation: “That kid is playin’
me
!” The actor was—and it would have to be, wouldn’t it?—Marlon Brando, and the play was
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Later, with his role as Terry Malloy in
On the Waterfront
, Brando cemented the cinematic image of the punchy boxer from the rough-and-tumble northeastern city for the rest of time. This again would haunt Newman: playing Graziano was guaranteed to garner even more of the “poor-man’s Brando” notices he’d gotten for
The Silver Chalice.
Robert Wise proved an ideal director for Newman, allowing for a couple of weeks’ rehearsal and giving him a chance to make suggestions. “Paul would get an idea for something,” Wise later said, “a little switch or a change, something he wanted to do—and on the surface I would say, ‘No, I don’t think that’s right, Paul. Forget it.’ And we’d go on. But I learned very quickly that he couldn’t forget it—it was stuck in his craw. So I found it was simpler with him to let him try it and then prove to himself that it was not good.”
The film shot in New York locations throughout the beginning of March 1956: Stillman’s, Riker’s Island, the Lower East Side, the Brooklyn Bridge, and various other sites with scenic resonance or a particular connection to Graziano’s life. Then they went to Hollywood, where the bulk of the film was made, including the vivid fight scenes. It was a comfortable set: Wise had cast a couple of young up-and-comers, Sal Mineo and Steven McQueen (as the future star was billed at the time), as members of Rocky’s gang; Pier Angeli, who had also survived
The Silver Chalice
, as Rocky’s sweetheart and eventual wife, Norma; and Eileen Heckart, from the Broadway cast of
Picnic
, as Rocky’s mother.
Like
The Rack, Somebody
has a strong subtext of father-son conflict, but there was broad humor, too, and a kind of knockabout quality to the plotting and—Warner Bros. was pleased to notice—a handsome young star who looked like a million bucks shirtless in the boxing ring. They liked what they saw so much that they decided to finish and release
Somebody
before
The Rack
, even though the latter was already completed, just to let the small psychological thriller enjoy some of the
publicity spillover from the boxing picture that they were sure would be a big hit. As a result,
Somebody
would come out almost immediately after being shot—just after the Fourth of July.
It’s an evocative and truly pleasurable picture, redolent of the great Warner Bros. urban dramas of the 1930s, with an ethnic slum setting, an antiheroic hero, and a surprising amount of honest edge for a film about a living celebrity. Newman is
definitely
(to quote Graziano’s catchphrase) channeling another persona, a garrulous pug with marbles in his mouth; a shuffling, jittery walk; and a certain slowness to absorb good advice or to read the subtext of a situation. He’s believably explosive when he needs to be, but he plays Rocky the swain and family man and loyal old friend with real pathos and a light comic touch. There’s plausible ferocity in the fight scenes (both in and out of the ring) and genuine tenderness in his dealings with Angeli. Wise sets the performances in a peppy and sometimes dark melodrama, giving it hints of neorealism and film noir when appropriate.
The reviews were good, although filled with the inevitable Brando references. “Let it be said of Mr. Newman that he plays the role of Graziano well,” said Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
, adding with the left hand, “making the pug and Marlon Brando almost indistinguishable.” In the
Los Angeles Times
Philip K. Scheuer similarly intoned, “Newman’s personal triumph is that of an actor who redeems the character he is portraying,” quickly undercutting this praise by declaring that Newman was “inescapably, in anything, a ‘Brando type.’” These sorts of things drove Newman to complain to an interviewer, “See how the guy haunts me? I wonder if anyone ever mistakes him for Paul Newman. I’d like to see that.” But that was a minor issue; most important, he had managed, with the one-two of
The Desperate Hours
and
Somebody Up There
, along with all his good TV work, to erase the awful impression of
The Silver Chalice.
I
T WAS
time to celebrate, then, and celebrate he did. On the night of July 6, the day Crowther’s positive review ran, Newman and Jackie left the kids with a sitter at the home they were newly renting in Lake Success, a small, affluent town in Long Island’s Nassau County, and headed
out to meet a party of friends at the Jolly Fisherman Restaurant in nearby Roslyn. A bit past midnight on what was turning into a toot of an evening, Newman left Jackie and the others in the restaurant and went roaring off in his Volkswagen. He drove through some shrubs at the Jolly Fisherman, knocked over a fire hydrant on Roslyn’s Main Street, and then ran a red light on Northern Boulevard, after which he was chased by police cars for a mile or so before being pulled over by Nassau County patrolman Rocco “Rocky” Caggiano and his partner.
Obviously drunk, Newman stepped out of his car and approached Caggiano defiantly. “I’m acting for Rocky Graziano. What do you want?” he barked.
“I’m Rocky too,” said the cop, “and you’re under arrest.”
Newman was handcuffed, put into a patrol car, and taken to the Mineola police station, where a band of reporters had been camped out waiting for news of a local boy who’d been kidnapped the day before.
When he was pulled from the car and led to the station, Newman caught sight of the crowd of pressmen and said to the cops, “This is a big deal! How did they know I’d been pinched?” Told why the reporters and photographers were actually there, he barked, “If they want a kidnapper, I’ll give them a kidnapper!” And he went into a little theatrical bit, stomping his feet and posing menacingly.