Authors: Shawn Levy
So too would any word that he
wasn’t
going to make a film. When
Two for the Seesaw
fell through, writer-director Robert Rossen
(All the King’s Men, Body and Soul)
came to think that maybe Newman would be the right guy for the next picture he had in mind. “I think Robert Rossen had actually signed somebody else,” Newman remembered, “and then he found out I was available and called me and said, ‘Can I send you a script?’ I read half of it and called my New York agent at six o’clock in the morning and said, ‘Get me this film.’ And he did.”
Rossen’s instinct was sharp, but he paid for it. Newman’s stature on the heels of
Exodus
was such that Rossen, who was producing the film as an independent, had to give him 10 percent of the picture. But having Newman aboard meant the picture was a go, which was all that mattered to the director. Rossen, whose major Hollywood career had been interrupted by encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee, was now hobbled by a combination of diabetes and alcoholism, but he was determined to make a film about a world that he knew well, the demimonde of smoky billiard halls and itinerant pool sharks. Writer Walter Tevis had published an acid little novel called
The Hustler
, about a dumb, gutty, foolish, gifted billiards player named Fast Eddie Felson who had to learn who he was and what mattered to him the hard way and to the occasional cost of innocent others. It was a
bravura bit of pulp, tightly atmospheric, filled with pinpoint detail and spare, snappy dialogue. Rossen immediately recognized its cinematic quality, as well as the opportunity to expose an authentic subculture on the movie screen. And he saw in Newman an exciting Fast Eddie. The picture, known initially as
Sin of Angels
, would start shooting in the winter in New York.
Newman respected Rossen’s knowledge of the subject matter and his commitment to the job. “He just pulled himself together to do the film,” Newman remembered, “and he was incredible.” Too, Newman loved the material and knew it was the best thing he’d ever had in front of him. Eddie Felson in his view was a guy trying to find himself, to express himself and his talents in an unorthodox way, to burst into the world and be a something instead of a nobody, and mostly, to realize his true self. Newman told an interviewer, “I spent the first thirty years of my life looking for a way to explode. For me, apparently, acting is that way.” For Fast Eddie it was pool, and Newman knew it instinctively. He asked Rossen to infuse the script with more material supporting his interpretation of the character: “I told Rossen he ought to somehow liken what Eddie does to what anybody who’s performing something sensational is doing—a ballplayer, say, or some guy who laid 477 bricks in one day.” Or, he might have added, a squarejohn from Shaker Heights who was making himself into a successful actor.
“I
T WAS
one of those movies when you woke every day and could hardly wait to get to work,” Newman said, “because you knew it was so good that nobody was going to be able to louse it up.” Since no studio was hovering over him, Rossen was free to operate on the cheap and get an authentic feel; the picture was shot in mid-town Manhattan during the winter and spring of 1961 over a span of ten weeks. They used the Greyhound Bus Terminal, some dive bars on Eighth Avenue, and, especially, Ames Billiard Academy on West Forty-fourth Street, where the gigantic figure of Jackie Gleason would appear to play his scenes as Minnesota Fats, the pool hall legend against whose figure Fast Eddie
measures himself.
*
In a stroke of genius Rossen cast the great comedian as a big, flamboyant, and shrewd gambler with courtly style and deadly talent. And the director was equally lucky in the other parts. George C. Scott, something of a shark among actors, moody and powerful and diffident, was cast as a mysterious fixer and financier of gambling scenarios. And Piper Laurie, a promising young actress with a résumé rather like Joanne Woodward’s of a couple years before, would play the bittersweet role of the love interest, a fallen daughter of privilege, drunken, overeducated, and partly lame.
To prepare for the film, Newman took lessons in straight pool from Willie Mosconi, the famed champion; he moved a billiard table into the Upper East Side apartment he and Joanne had bought, and he got good enough, as with the trombone, to play a lot of his own shots in the film. Naturally, being in a pool hall with Jackie Gleason and being a good fella, Newman found himself tempted into a little bit of a wager. He and Gleason, he recollected, played a little match of four games; the first three were for a buck apiece, and Newman won them; the fourth was for $100, and, said Newman, “He whipped my ass.” Gleason, of course, had been winning bets like this for years; he was in life very like the man he was playing in the film. Newman, who had learned merely to imitate the type for the role, respected and admired a man who lived it: “He was hustling me. He was looking down my throat the whole time. And the thing that was marvelous, he had such patience. Because everyone in the crew is standing around watching these games going on. He had the patience to lose the first
three to sucker me in for the last one.” (As Gleason related, Newman paid the bet off in pennies.)
And Gleason could be very droll about Newman’s actorly habits. Although Gleason had come up as an actor as much as a comedian, he was somewhat out of his element playing such dramatic material. One morning Mosconi was serving as a stuntman, in effect, by executing an exacting pool shot just off camera so as to make it look as if Gleason had taken it; after ten successive attempts, though, he couldn’t get it just right, and Gleason bellowed, “Get Lee Strasberg in here immediately!”
After
The Hustler
wrapped, the Newmans spent the months leading up to Melissa’s birth in a Beverly Hills house they rented from B-movie star Linda Christian (a nude torso of her, cracked by the weather, stood in the garden). Jackie had moved with her three kids to a home nearby in the San Fernando Valley, where she would live for more or less the rest of her life, eventually remarrying; Scott, Susan, and Stephanie would grow up there with her, but they invariably spent time with Newman when he was living and working in Hollywood and often lived with him for extended periods in New York and, eventually, Connecticut.
Newman shot the film version of
Sweet Bird of Youth
that summer, reuniting in the cast with Geraldine Page and Rip Torn and with Richard Brooks, who’d directed his previous film performance in a Tennessee Williams story. It was an unhappy experience. Brooks had rewritten Williams again, only this time in such a way that the actors for whom the piece had, in effect, originally been composed couldn’t find their way back into it. And the studio forbade the stars from talking about the picture to the press, a fact to which Newman would allude as if with a raised eyebrow to indicate the damning truth of it. However, in consideration of his new pay rate—$350,000—he could respectfully comply with Brooks’s wishes.
Newman then engaged in a project that had some of the savor of the live TV days of just a few years before—an epoch that, it was clear, would never be resurrected. Martin Ritt and Jerry Wald were filming an omnibus of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories that A. E. Hotchner had adapted into an episodic feature film. One of the stories
was “The Battler,” and Newman fancied getting into the persona and makeup of Ad Francis once again, “as an exercise in acting.” His agents at MCA weren’t too happy with his choice. He was highly marketable at the moment, and they could find lots of well-paid jobs for him if he’d let them. “They said I was a star,” he remembered. “I couldn’t cheapen myself by playing a bit part.” But he was serious about seeing what he’d learned about his craft over the past six years. He sat dutifully for makeup each morning (photos of his transformation ran in
Life
magazine) and then played his scenes for Ritt opposite Richard Beymer (as Adams) and Juano Hernandez (as Francis’s traveling buddy and minder). He looked forward, he told Hedda Hopper, to taking in both of his own performances as a form of quality control. “I want to run the old TV film and compare it with my present performance,” he said. “I want to see if being a movie star has diluted my work as an actor.”
I
F HE
was thinking overly about his status as a movie star, it was because his career had truly bloomed into something he had never imagined. In early 1962 the Newmans were given a free cruise from New York to the Mediterranean in exchange for being the featured on-ship celebrities on an ocean liner; they spent as much time as they could boozing and gossiping with Gore Vidal, who was also roped into the cruise, but they also had to present their films as part of the evening’s entertainment; one middle-aged woman fell so under Newman’s spell that she literally followed him around the boat like a puppy dog.
When they got back to the States, he found himself in the midst of Academy Award season, and
The Hustler
was in contention for an impressive nine prizes: best picture, actor, actress, director, screenplay, cinematography, and art direction, and two for best supporting actor.
*
All of these nominations were worthy, but Newman’s was especially well deserved. He was the focus of virtually every scene in the film
and carried it all—the swagger, the nervous tension, the sexual confidence, the not-quite-sharp calculation, the mercenary skill with the cue stick, the crushing humiliation, the hard-earned redemption—with appealing certainty. Sometimes he worked too hard, striking calculated poses as he had in Eve Arnold’s famous photo of the Actors Studio. But there was fluency and daring in his work beyond what he’d demonstrated previously. Even Ben Quick of
The Long, Hot Summer
didn’t have the cynicism of Eddie Felson, and Quick’s rehabilitation was neither so arduous nor so convincing.
The Hustler
was hardly a blockbuster, but it was the first truly iconic thing Newman did, and it would be remembered fondly and deservedly for decades.
Still, it was a tricky moment in the business, and the Oscars had been particularly funny for him so far. He thought that he should have been recognized with a nomination for
Somebody Up There Likes Me
, but he had been ignored; he had stood by magnanimously when Joanne won for
Three Faces of Eve;
and he felt he had a real shot with
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(David Niven won for
Separate Tables
). This time he seemed the favorite against Charles Boyer in the little-seen
Fanny
, Stuart Whitman in the little-seen
The Mark
, and Maximilian Schell and Spencer Tracy, who seemed likely to cancel each other out for their performances in
Judgment at Nuremberg.
Schell, who had originated his part in a TV version of the Abby Mann script, had won the New York Film Critics Circle prize but was relatively unknown in the States. Newman had won the British Film Academy award and was emerging as a true Hollywood superstar; plus, he had been immense in the role of Fast Eddie. Surely it was his.
On an April night at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Joan Crawford came out to award the best actor Oscar, and the TV cameras caught a glimpse of Newman so balled up in his seat that his pant cuffs had hiked up, exposing his calves. And then Crawford opened the envelope and called out the name Maximilian Schell. Schell gave a humble, tasteful speech, and Newman applauded him. But Joanne, who had presented the award for sound recording and was still backstage when Schell won, was another matter. “My husband behaved like a gentleman,” she remembered. “He was, I’m sure, bitterly hurt and disappointed,
but he didn’t act as if he was. I’m ashamed to admit I was wild. I was furious and upset and in tears. Backstage, I made a terrible spectacle of myself. I wouldn’t even speak to Max, and it certainly wasn’t
his
fault!”
N
EWMAN WOULD
have another chance at the golden statuette sooner than later. With Ritt, he was developing a film based on
Horseman, Pass By
, a modern-day western that was the affecting first novel of a young Texan named Larry McMurtry. The narrator, Lonnie Bannon, orphaned by his parents, lives with his grandpa Homer on a family-run cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Homer is old enough to be thinking about the day he’ll have to leave the ranch to his sole surviving son—Lonnie’s uncle. But the guy is a son of a bitch: mean and selfish and boozy and demanding. A handsome bastard with an ugly heart, carousing with other men’s wives, forcing himself drunkenly on a black housemaid, accepting all comers in fights and dares and whatnot, capable and reckless, cocksure and narcissistic, he went by the name of Hud.
McMurtry’s book was adapted by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., who had also written
The Long, Hot Summer
and who would join Newman and Ritt in producing the new film. From the start they had been looking for a more marquee-friendly title than the novel bore. For a time they tinkered with
Wild Desire;
McMurtry offered several suggestions, including
Coitus on Horseback
(“A title,” he remembered, “I had long hoped to fit onto something”); then they tried
The Winners
and then
Hud Bannon Against the World
and then
Hud Bannon.
Finally they settled on the obvious and shortened it to one blunt syllable:
Hud.
Their choice—and the film’s eventual marketing campaign, with Newman togged out as a lean and mean cowhand—was based purely on Newman’s manly magnetism; the new title indicated how fully he had come to dominate any picture in which he appeared.
Next the filmmakers had to deal with complaints that the material was too dark. Even compared to the flawed fellows Newman had played in the past—Rocky Graziano, Ben Quick, Brick Pollitt, Chance Wayne,
Eddie Felson—Hud Bannon was detestable. And his comportment through the central crisis of the film, when the family’s entire stock of cattle must be destroyed because of an incident of hoof-and-mouth disease, is inhuman. In the face of his father’s sense of decency and the common good, he wants to sell the herd and let the next fellow worry about the contamination. And when his father stands up to him, he tries to maneuver the old man out of ownership of the ranch through legal chicanery.