Authors: Shawn Levy
D
URING THAT
crazy political summer,
Rachel, Rachel
was released to respectful and even admiring reviews. Writing in the
New York Times
, Renata Adler called it “a little sappy at moments, but the best written, most seriously acted American movie in a long time.” It was a strange and small and vivid film, rich in actorly moments, but unique too for its authentic air of lived-in, small-town realities—an American indie movie decades before there was such a genre. It was constructed with tasteful and sturdy craft that could sometimes strain when striving for poetic effect. But it was handsome and fluid and filled with fine and fresh moments: the intimate rewards of the careful writing and acting and observation of a tiny flame of life daring to burn brighter and higher, and the splashy, lurid bits that made it feel grown-up for its time: a lesbian kiss, a sex scene, a trippy visit to a newfangled Christian tabernacle.
Aside from a financial stake, Newman felt justifiable pride in the movie, and he went out and beat the drum hard for it. “I’ve never sold a film before, have I?” he asked columnist Sheila Graham over lunch. “I’m selling it because it’s a special kind of film.” He consented to photo shoots and dozens of interviews and small invitation-only screenings at which he would discuss the film with journalists and opinion-makers. There was a premiere in New York, and the Newmans did the rounds of the TV talk shows. And his publicist, Warren Cowan, launched a campaign for Oscar nominations for Newman, Joanne, Estelle Parsons, and Stewart Stern.
Newman rarely worked this hard to promote movies he was paid
nearly seven figures to act in, but he told a reporter, “I had so much at stake. I was putting my taste up against eight major studios who refused to buy
Rachel.
I had something to prove, really. I was terribly afraid the film would get sloughed. I don’t think the people who distributed it had any real faith in it.”
“I hope it’s successful,” he told Rex Reed, “not because of any financial reward—hell, both Joanne and I did it for nothing—but to prove to Hollywood you can make a film about basic, simple people without violence.”
The picture did succeed, grossing upward of $9 million at the box office: a real hit given the cost of making it. Eventually Newman was able to cash in on the success by selling Kayos, which owned a third of
Rachel
and 10 percent of
The Hustler
, to a realty holding company in exchange for about $738,000 of stock and the promise of another such payment if Kayos could produce as well again in the subsequent five years. Successful too were Warren Cowan’s efforts to single out
Rachel
in a year in which there was such competition for Academy Awards as
The Lion in Winter, Rosemary’s Baby, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Funny Girl, Bullitt, The Odd Couple, Faces
, and
The Producers.
When the Oscar nominations were announced,
Rachel
was up for four, including best picture, best actress, best supporting actress, and best adapted screenplay.
But not best director. Which hurt. Newman had actually won the directing prize at that year’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards. “Four critics walked out when the vote was counted,” he crowed. “Being perverse, I take a good deal of the credit for that.”
*
He was nominated for feature film direction by the Directors Guild. And he took the top prize at the Producers Guild Awards. But he was passed over by the Academy nominators in favor of Gillo Pontecorvo for
The Battle of Algiers.
Seemingly every year at the Oscars, one of the directors of a best picture nominee is shut out for his work; that year it was Newman.
As when her husband lost for
Hud
, Woodward was incensed: “I couldn’t have been nominated for best actress or Estelle Parsons for
supporting actress without his being the director. This negates the whole purpose of the Academy. I’m not going to go. It’s a total boycott!” Newman tried to talk sense to her: “You’re being emotional.” A few days later she demurred: “My husband decided I should go and do what he says.” They showed up on Oscar night, and
Rachel
lost in all categories. The next day Newman griped about the whole ordeal. “There must be something wrong with a group that hands out awards and then has to send out telegrams saying, ‘Please come,’” he said. “It should be fun to go to—not agony. There’s something barbaric about it.”
He had to admit there was a personal element to his complaint. “It was pretty hard to win the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best director for that film and then not even get nominated for the Oscar,” he admitted. “But I’m not gonna whine about it.”
A
ND HE
had reasons not to whine: millions of them, in fact.
There was excellent reason to believe that he would profit immensely from the new production company he’d formed with John Foreman. Foreman had been wanting to produce for a while—agents were legally prevented from doing so—and he recognized that the best way to change careers would be to attach himself to Newman. He had plans to make a picture about a pair of western outlaws from a script by William Goldman. But for its first film the Newman-Foreman Company would make a film about auto racing called
Winning.
Universal Pictures was paying Newman $1.1 million to play a race-car driver in it—the highest sum ever offered to an actor in a deal for a single film, and nearly one and a half times the entire budget of
Rachel, Rachel.
Joanne was scheduled to play opposite him, and filming would take them to Indiana and the famed annual five-hundred-mile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
It was pure melodrama: a rootless race-car driver meets a small-town divorcée who leaves her world to marry him and join his; he bonds with her teenage son, but he becomes so obsessed with his work that she stumbles into an affair with one of his fellow drivers. It plays out against a backdrop of several races in several different classes of cars, but mostly it’s set at the Indy 500, an event for which drivers and
their teams often spend a month or more making preparations and living near the raceway. It would shoot in the spring and summer of 1968 for release the following year around Indy time. Written by veteran screenwriter Howard Rodman,
Winning
would be directed by James Goldstone, a TV hand with a couple of features to his credit. Robert Wagner and Richard Thomas would play the adulterous teammate and the confused teenager, respectively. The fourteen-week shoot would take them to Indianapolis; Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; Riverside and Bakersfield, California; and studios in Hollywood.
Just as he had with boxing and billiards and the trombone, Newman seized the opportunity to research his character by learning about auto racing. He had long been enamored of speed, ever since he bought his scooter and, later, when he was commuting between New York and Westport or around Southern California in his Porsche-infused VWs. Lately he had owned a series of big, manly Corvettes and pacey Porsche coupes. He occasionally sponsored cars and drivers in races benefiting charities. And there had been the motorcycles, since abandoned. “I get ‘stoned’ on automobiles,” he confessed. “For me it’s a natural high, which is marvelous.”
To prepare for
Winning
, he and Wagner were tutored by veteran racer Bob Bondurant, whose School of High Performance Driving was where James Garner and Yves Montand had learned the trade before making
Grand Prix
a few years earlier. Newman and Wagner would have only a couple of weeks to learn to drive a variety of cars—and their studies would be interrupted by the need to keep to the production schedule and to be in certain places when races were being held.
They started very slowly, with classroom lectures and then walks along the length of the test track. Then they sat while Bondurant drove and talked them through what he was doing and why. The emphasis was on technique: the heel-and-toe system by which drivers keep the right foot on the gas pedal and the brake at once; the calculation of approaching a turn and choosing and maintaining a course through and out of it; braking and steering; some emergency procedures. Bondurant started them out on small boxy Datsun sedans and then worked them up in size until they reached muscle-bound stock cars and, finally, racing Lolas that could hit speeds upward of 150 miles per hour.
Newman was an apt student. Within six days of his first drive he ran a 34-second lap on a track in Phoenix where the record was just under 29. Within two weeks he drove a lap at Indianapolis at 143 miles per hour. The filmmakers hadn’t pushed him to such a pace: “I’ve told him time and again that anything over 120 doesn’t show on camera anyway, but he wouldn’t listen to me,” Goldstone said. Rather, it simply felt good to him. “I never had any sensation of speed,” Newman revealed. “The only time you’re conscious of anything is if something breaks.”
He got quite competent. For the Indy 500 portions of the film, Newman himself drove amid a field of professionals. In the final cut of the film, the wider shots showing the progress of Newman’s character on the track were actually shots of Bobby Unser in the 1968 Indy 500. But when they cut in for close-ups, Newman was in the car himself, keeping pace with the camera car being driven by two-time Indy winner Roger Ward.
He had some laughs with his new pastime, taking his old navy pilot for a blistering couple of laps of the Road America track at Elkhart Lake and scaring the crap out of him. “They had to
pry
his hand loose from the roll bar,” Newman cackled. And he even got Joanne into a car: “She actually did make one circle around the Indy track. Sure, she may be the only person who ever drove it at forty miles an hour, but she tried.”
Actually, she wasn’t at all happy. She came out to watch him only occasionally. The atmosphere of the racetrack was as uncomfortable for her as the ballets and dance recitals to which she would drag her husband were for him. She skipped his racing practices as often as possible, and when she did show up at trackside in Indy, she couldn’t decide which was worse: the prospect of him killing himself in a crack-up or the clutches of screaming women holding up signs pleading “Paul, Please Slow Down” and clucking over him as he walked around the set. “I wish I wasn’t married to him now,” she grumbled to a reporter.
To his credit, Newman didn’t see the film merely as an excuse to drive fast. He studied the world of racing and considered the sexual and emotional tensions of the story just as carefully as he did his clutching and shifting techniques. Roger Ward had been hired to
teach him the finer points of open-wheeled Indy cars and of the Indy track. But he found that Newman was as curious about his teacher’s private life as he was about driving. “He was interested in emotional attitudes,” Ward recalled, “in my relationships with the mechanics and the car owners. He even spent a couple of nights in my home talking with my wife, reading her emotions.”
The problem with
Winning
was that Goldstone was better at conveying the excitement of racing than the more intimate and dramatic aspects of the story. It got deservedly mixed reviews on its release in the summer of 1969, although it turned out to be a modest financial success. But in the long run Newman took more than money from the project. He had been introduced to a thrilling new fascination and challenge. He was thinking, he said, of continuing his auto racing education when his work schedule allowed. “I would hesitate to drive in competition now,” he said, “not because I would be afraid to but because I’m too old. I started late, and my reflexes aren’t really as hot as they should be. I’d hate to run seventeenth in a field of fourteen.”
A
S SOON
as he’d put
Winning
behind him, he went to work on William Goldman’s western, an account of the legendary outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the final days when a man could team up with some buddies to rob and rove and raise hell and flout the law and light out for the territory and feel the wild frontier in his heart just as vividly as he could behold it with his eyes. The script was written with a light touch, a sense of delight, jaunty dramatic pace and structure. It had a bit of modernish sex in it, inspired perhaps by
Jules and Jim
, and more than a bit of horseplay, inspired perhaps by Hope and Crosby. It felt youthful in its willingness to goose the formulas of the cowboy genre, but it felt old and wise and even sad, too, with its suggestion that the Wild West was no more and that such fellows as its protagonists could no longer run rampant in our world and our time: that perfect Newman blend of the traditional and the new.
Newman loved the script as soon as he read it and was excited to play the part of the Sundance Kid, the more headstrong and impetuous of the leads—the younger, sexier one. For Butch, a schemer, dreamer,
and tactician who ruled the gang and eluded authorities with his wits and not his daring, Goldman had always imagined Jack Lemmon. But Lemmon was no longer right for this sort of film and was quickly erased from calculations.
In fact, the actor best suited to play Butch was Newman—but Newman didn’t see it. In one of his first meetings with George Roy Hill, whom 20th Century–Fox had hired to direct the film, he kept talking about Sundance’s motives and suggesting changes in his lines.
Hill was puzzled: “Why are we talking about Sundance? You’re playing Butch.”
“I’m Sundance,” Newman told him.
“No, you’re not.”
“George, I was here first—I’m Sundance.”
“I went back and read the script that night,” Newman remembered, “and thought, hell, the parts are really about equal and they’re both great parts. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll be Butch.’”
Which left the question of who would play Sundance. As Freddie Fields recalled,
*
Warren Beatty had heard about the script and wanted in. That looked promising. But when Beatty learned that Newman was to play Butch, he insisted on the part for himself—and then he claimed he could get Marlon Brando to play Sundance. No one really wanted Brando, though, so when he finally got hold of the script and declared that
he
was prepared to play Butch, they had reason to pass on him, gratefully.