Authors: Shawn Levy
The moneymen at Paramount, who’d put up $2,350,000, couldn’t swallow it. “I remember when the studio executives were reading the script,” Ravetch said. “They paled. One of them said, ‘When does he get nice?’ I said, ‘Never.’” Indeed, Hud’s unremitting cruelty was in part what recommended the material to Newman and Ritt: they wanted to make a movie that broke the mold of all the Hollywood films in which a leading man turned from heel to hero in the final reel. Newman had made a couple of such pictures himself, and he was eager to throw the formula away.
Ritt wanted to make sure the film’s themes of corruption weren’t overcome by a romantic image of fading cowboy life. So he and cinematographer James Wong Howe shot the film in black and white and did a deliriously beautiful, lyrical job of capturing the desolation of the Panhandle. They spent several weeks on location in Claude, Texas, an empty little town about thirty miles southeast of Amarillo. Newman got to bomb around the endless roads in a big Cadillac convertible and wrestle a pig in a dusty rodeo arena.
Along with his cast mates—including Brandon de Wilde, who had played the little boy in
Shane;
veteran Melvyn Douglas; and Patricia Neal, playing the maid, who’d been rewritten as white for the screen—he stayed at a large motel in Amarillo, and the place was swarmed by local women who seemed to have gone completely insane for him. “Women were literally trying to climb through the transoms at the hotel where I stayed,” he remembered. Policemen had to be dispatched to the premises to keep intruders away. “If it was teenagers I could see it,” one cop complained, “but it ain’t. It’s grown women, too …Somethin’ like this comes to town, and you find out just how crazy the public is.” To thwart the interlopers, Newman and de Wilde both changed
hotel rooms several times. But calm would be restored only when the company returned to the Paramount lot in Hollywood to shoot the film’s interior scenes.
N
EWMAN HAD
appeared in two films a year since 1956, adding two extra in 1958; he’d be in three in 1963. Gradually he was becoming a true marquee star, piercing the Quigley Poll, which measured actors’ popularity with audiences, for the first time ever in 1963, when he finished ninth.
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He was becoming a household name and, with his eyes and hard, lean body and angelic face and sardonic smile, a real sex symbol. “Some of the fan mail I’m suddenly receiving makes me blush,” he confessed—in large part because he couldn’t imagine that it was himself to whom these avowals of female passion were addressed. “I’m as sexy as a piece of Canadian bacon,” he squirmed. He was a grown man, looking squarely at forty, but he had the vigor and appeal of youth—which, ironically, he hadn’t quite had, or at least hadn’t been aware that he had, back when he was young.
But if his coltish quality made him seem fresher than his years, he was also an adult with adult responsibilities: a wife, five children, an ex-wife, and so on. As his star rose, so too did his need to see to his private business on his own terms. As a respite from what had been a pretty steady diet of work and work-related travel, the Newmans had secured a redoubt not only from Hollywood but from New York and, indeed, the world.
Nook House they called it; Susan Newman came up with the name when the place was first described to her. A converted barn filled with bedrooms and a big open area to live and eat in, it stood on 2.5 acres ending on a bluff over the slender Aspetuck River in a wooded portion of Westport, Connecticut.
“It’s the most beautiful house that was ever designed for a family
with five children,” Joanne declared. It was only the fourth or fifth house they saw on an impulsive real estate hunt, and Joanne’s fancy was immediately taken by the tree house on the property. They took a quick look inside and bought it, paying $96,000 for house and property and spending a bit more than that again to renovate it and add improvements. Eventually there’d be a pool and cabana with sauna, a guest house that doubled as a den (complete with pool table and screening room), and a tombstone commemorating all the family pets who’d lived there and gone on to meet their reward.
In the main house the wooden beams and stone fireplace were complemented with antiques, including the famed brass bed, lots of framed photos of the Newmans and their family and friends, books and flowers and comfortable furniture, and a couple of bits of film and stage memorabilia, including Joanne’s Oscar, tastefully off to the side on a bookcase. Joanne had some advice from decorators, including the stage designer Ralph Alswang, but she relied chiefly on her own eye and sense of gesture: the enormous dining table, for instance, which she explained was actually “a seventeenth-century Irish wake table. The coffin goes in the middle and everyone sits around and weeps and eats.”
It was a country house but near enough to Manhattan to be, in effect, a suburban retreat par excellence. And Newman’s life was circling about itself in grand, affirmative fashion. Art Newman had brought himself and his family from East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights to the curved, tree-lined streets of Shaker Heights, which was a real achievement. But his son was now a property owner in the sort of ideal Connecticut town on which the classic garden suburbs of the 1920s, like Shaker Heights, were based. Westport hadn’t grown out of some scheme to re-create the pastoral past on the outskirts of a city; it was the real thing, first settled by white men in the seventeenth century, dotted with wealthy farms and farmhouses from the Revolutionary War era, with a quaint town center and plenty of exposure to the waters of Long Island Sound—and all within fifty miles of Times Square. For a small Connecticut town, it had a cultural sophistication: the Westport Country Playhouse, a respected regional theater, had been founded there 1931 and helped launch dozens of important acting, directing,
and playwrighting careers; and the town had a long-standing reputation as an artists’ colony, attracting famous writers, painters, musicians, and actors since the Civil War era.
Newman had been thinking of buying a home in Connecticut since he was married to Jackie. He was familiar with Westport, in particular, from the time he and Joanne shot some exterior scenes for
Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!
there. And, too, Nook House was near the home of A. E. Hotchner, with whom Newman would become partners on a number of small boats, some bearing the name
Caca de Toro (Bullshit).
(“We were terrible fishermen,” Hotchner remembered, and Newman concurred, stating of himself that he was “the worst fisherman on the East Coast.”)
But it still struck many observers as unusual that a Hollywood star would make his home in such a place. To make it even odder, the Newmans were living not in the Gold Coast portion of Westport, with views of Long Island Sound, but in the wooded area of the town, on a busyish road, with a middle school right across the street: hardly the poshest spot, even in a town with a bohemian air.
From the first, Newman claimed that his residency in Connecticut wasn’t a big or an unusual thing: “A dear friend of ours lived there, and we found a house that suited us,” he’d say, or “I moved here from Ohio, went to school here. I moved to New York and did some plays and bought a house in Connecticut, and that’s where I live.” Of course, in the status-conscious movie business, it was crazy enough to live in New York. Living in Connecticut was like sticking a thumb in the boss’s eye.
The Newmans would, in fact, keep apartments in New York for decades, and they rented homes in Los Angeles for long stretches, including much of the school years of their two youngest daughters. (Newman had a favorite spot: “Malibu in September and October is unsurpassed,” he opined.) But they were easily put off by the parochial aspects of living in Hollywood—the continuous obsession with money, celebrity, and the next deal. They preferred to keep a quiet space to themselves, and if that made them seem aloof to people, that was their problem. No one was shocked when a banker or a lawyer moved his family to an appropriate home and turned into a commuter; why should
it matter that an actor would do the same? “I love the seasons,” Newman said. “I love the house that I live in. I like the people here. I don’t know why there should be any excessive comment about that.”
O
F ALL
the things that were special about Westport, the tree house that first caught Joanne’s eye would become, perhaps, the most important in their lives. They created from it an adults-only space where they kindled their marriage in private. “That’s where Joanne and I have cocktails,” Newman said. “The kids are not allowed up there.” They’d repair with newspapers and beer and sherry or, on special nights, champagne and caviar. At first it was a summertime idyll, but ultimately it was available to them year-round: Joanne had it winterized for him as a present.
Smart woman. If Newman had a tiger by the tail in his career, then Joanne had one in her marriage. If he was considered the most desirable man in America, she was the woman who had pried him away from his first marriage in an unlikely love match. He looked like a Greek god; he never took a bad picture, literally. Her own looks were mutable; she could be stunning or plain, ordinary or exotic, kittenish or tomboyish. And while it was clear that she still had finer acting chops than he did, surely he wasn’t attracted to her for that; he could’ve married Helen Hayes or Ethel Barrymore if that was what turned him on.
She knew what the talk was like, about him and especially about their match. “I’ve long since adjusted to my husband’s status as a superstar and a sex symbol,” she would say. “The only place I’m a sex symbol is at home, and I’m very lucky that my husband thinks I’m sexy. I don’t worry about women who come on strong with him, because I know what he thinks of them.” Five years after they’d spent the shoot of
The Long, Hot Summer
in constant communion on the streets of Clinton, Louisiana, they were still that way. “They’re the most hand-holding couple I ever saw,” said a longtime friend, and the sense was that Newman reached for his wife’s hand more often than the other way around.
For his part, Newman spoke of her in genuinely fond terms that
were meant to emphasize her congeniality and allure but perhaps too often sounded laddish or indelicate. “She’s the last of the great broads,” he was fond of saying early in their marriage, and then a few years later, famously and to his regret, he asserted his monogamy by declaring, “I have steak at home; why should I go out for a hamburger?” (Chastened by Joanne for comparing her, in effect, to a piece of meat, he tried another metaphor. “She’s like a classy ’62 Bordeaux,” he told a female interviewer. “No, make it a ’59. That’s a year that ages well in the bottle. Will I get in trouble for that?”)
The mystery of their marriage fueled gossip and speculation for decades. While they were in France making
Paris Blues
, around the time of their third anniversary, the columnist Mike Connolly reported that they were close to breaking apart, and Newman, informed of the article, went ballistic. He fired off a cable to Connolly that read “You’ve always been irresponsible. Keep up the good work”; he denounced him to other writers as an “inaccurate dolt”; and he got Joe Hyams, a Hollywood correspondent who always enjoyed chummy relations with his subjects, to allow him an entire column in which to lambaste Connolly, mockingly declaring that he was going to take steps to ruin his marriage just to give the writer’s words the scent of truth.
But it wasn’t only ill-informed outsiders who wondered how the marriage of the world’s most handsome man and his somewhat less glamorous wife held together. Otto Preminger, who had many chances to measure the Newmans’ relationship during the months of shooting
Exodus
, put his finger on the secret of it, and it was the plainest one imaginable: “He’s an oddity in this business. He really loves his wife.” And Stewart Stern, best man at their wedding, vouched for Newman’s love. “Paul has a sense of real adoration for what Joanne can do,” he remarked. “He’s constantly trying to provide a setting where the world can see what he sees in her.”
She reciprocated his feelings by being at his side as colleague and partner as much as wife, lover, and mother. For one thing, she virtually gave up acting unless he was involved in a project. Between 1956 and 1963 he made eighteen films and she made ten, five of which starred both of them. “They’re peculiar about their working,” said a producer at the time. “They refuse to be separated. Many an actress has got her
big chance in a role that Joanne turned down because it would keep her away from Paul.” She herself acknowledged as much. “Acting is a career for Paul, but not for me,” she declared, within mere years of winning her Oscar. “Being Paul’s wife is my career. I don’t forget that for an instant. And I never do anything which would let him think I won’t be there when he turns to me.”
Newman understood what a deal he was getting. For one thing, he was enormously impressed with Joanne’s acting talent, which was much more instinctual than his burning-the-midnight-oil style. And because he was enjoying the life of a movie star, he understood what she had effectively given up for him. “We haven’t had to be separated all that much,” he acknowledged. “She’s had many opportunities to go abroad or on location by herself, and she’s turned these offers down in order to stay with me; she’s done this to the detriment of her career, I’m afraid. But it’s helped keep us together.”
He tried to dote on her, but he was clumsy in the effort in an earnest and somewhat cloddish fashion. “For quite a while after we were married,” she remembered, “he’d send me flowers on a certain day in September, which he thought was my birthday. Since I was born in February, I finally pointed out to him that his
first
wife was born in September.”
(P.S.: She forgave him.)
*
The character Gleason played was not based on the living fellow who used to call himself Minnesota Fats in the saloons, billiard halls, and casinos of America and who became a minor TV celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s. Walter Tevis always swore that Fats and Eddie were works of fiction, and he deeply resented the notion that he had created two such memorable characters out of mere reportage. He complained to a journalist that people asking him when he had met Minnesota Fats was like asking Walt Disney, “When did you meet Donald Duck?” Tevis, who also wrote
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, died in 1984 after writing a sequel to
The Hustler
called
The Color of Money.
His widow would spend decades debunking the claims of those who pretended to be the original Fast Eddie.
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West Side Story
, set, ironically, in a world not far away from Rossen’s Mid-town purgatory, had received eleven nominations and would be the big winner on Oscar night.
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He would rank in the poll every year from 1963 to 1975 (save 1965, when he didn’t have a release) and would eventually appear in it fourteen times overall—seventh most frequently of all time—and rank as number one in 1969 and 1970.