Paul Newman (28 page)

I
N
M
ARCH
1971 B
URT
R
OSEN AND
D
AVID
W
INTER, A PAIR OF
TV producers who were at work on a project with Newman, attended an auction of movie memorabilia at Sotheby Parke Bernet’s Los Angeles Hall, where two thousand items from the prop rooms of 20th Century–Fox were being sold. They had their eyes on a particular item and got into a heated bidding competition against composer Burt Bacharach and his wife, Angie Dickinson. Eventually Rosen and Winter won, paying $3,100 for the bicycle that Newman rode so charmingly and daringly in the “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” sequence of
Butch Cassidy.
The two producers made a gift of their prize to Joanne Woodward, who donated it the following month to a charity auction.

Maybe she didn’t like bicycles. Maybe she didn’t like clutter. Maybe she didn’t like “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” Or maybe she didn’t like—or didn’t want to be reminded of
—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
During the production of that film Newman began an affair with Nancy Bacon, a divorced Hollywood journalist whom 20th Century–Fox had sent to write a puff piece about the movie for magazine serialization. And rumors and publicity having to do with this liaison nearly scuttled the Newmans’ marriage.

By Bacon’s account, she and Newman spent several days together on the film’s sets in Cuernavaca and Taxco—and nights in Newman’s suite at a hotel then called the Vista Hermosa. When they were back in Los Angeles, they met in Bacon’s apartment. There were periods when
the affair cooled, but Newman kept coming back until midway through 1969, when he and Joanne briefly separated and he determined to repair the damage he’d done to his marriage. There were a few more secret liaisons, and then longer periods of absence. In time Bacon became disillusioned with the affair, and it died of its own inertia. “I finally said to myself, I can do better than this,” she remembered. “I told him, ‘You’re always drunk, and you can’t even make love.’ I ended it.”

The whole mess might have stayed between them had not Joyce Haber, a syndicated gossip columnist, announced in July that she’d heard “fascinating rumors, so far unchecked,” that “the Paul Newmans are living apart, according to friends, and will soon get a divorce.” In the next day’s
Los Angeles Times
, the following half-page ad, which cost approximately $2,500 to publish, appeared:

This was a stunner, and it got folks talking. The Newmans’ marriage, then eleven years along, was considered stable: all those kids, the famed Connecticut home, the films they’d worked on together, the collaborative success of
Rachel, Rachel.
It didn’t seem right. Gossipy movie fan magazines had often tried to goose a few sales out of articles speculating that the Newmans were at odds with each other (“Shout by Shout: Paul Newman’s Bitter Fights with His Wife”; “Strange Rumors About Hollywood’s ‘Happiest Marriage’”) or that forty-three-year-old Newman was feeling randy and seeking consolations outside the home (“Paul Newman’s Just at That Age”; “Is Paul Newman’s Joanne Too Possessive?”). Invariably, they all stopped short of actually announcing
real trouble or accusing Newman of adultery. The Newmans were supposed to be examples. But this strange advertisement didn’t so much squelch rumors as give people reason to wonder about them.

They didn’t have to wait long for a fuller story. Later that year a gossip magazine published Bacon’s tell-all about the affair, an article filled with details of Newman’s life that had never before been printed and supported by a photo of Bacon and Newman looking quite chummy on the set of
Butch.
Saying that she felt the ad the Newmans had run was an unforgivable lie, Bacon shared an amazing portrait of Newman as a reckless, boozy, sneaky rat who was torn by impulses to act like a straight arrow and to career about like a rubber ball.

Bacon had been around Hollywood for a little while as a writer, an actress, and a scenester. A native of Washington state, she had been married to Don Wilson, one of the founding members of the surf guitar band the Ventures, and had a daughter by him. After their divorce she began running with a fast young Hollywood crowd. She’d been involved for a spell with Jay Sebring, the celebrity hairstylist (he had famously cut both Newman’s and Steve McQueen’s hair in modern styles) who was unlucky enough to be at Sharon Tate’s house when it was attacked by Charles Manson’s ghoulish minions. She had also been attached to Tommy Smothers and, when she started to hang around regularly at the Factory, had a flirtatious relationship with Robert F. Kennedy. Another beau, the producer Paul Monash, who was at work on
Butch Cassidy
and had a thing for her, was the guy who got her the writing assignment on his set.

And that was how she fell in with Newman. Everyone in Mexico knew about it. “Redford would kind of beard for us,” Bacon remembered. “But we got out of the same hotel rooms and got into the same cars to go to the set.” And the romance continued back home. “We were hot and heavy for about a year and a half,” she said. “He was at my house almost every night for two or three weeks.” He would return home, Bacon claimed, to see Joanne and the kids, to whom he explained his absence by saying that he was out making movies. But no such story would have worked to keep their affair hidden from their social circle. “It was the worst-kept secret in Hollywood,” she
said. “People used to joke about it: ‘Paul may not go out for hamburger, but he sure goes out for Bacon.’”

Bacon wrote about the affair twice, each time revealing new details about the private Newman.
*
She knew what he drank (beers followed by scotch followed by more beers) and how much (a
lot
), what he drove (the VWs with the Porsche innards) and how (fast), how he dressed (jeans and moccasins, no socks), his favorite music (Bach), and details about the new film that he and Joanne had been shooting in New Orleans but that wouldn’t premiere for more than a year (adapted from Robert Stone’s novel
Hall of Mirrors
, it would be released as
WUSA
). She described his yearning and his lovemaking, his goofball jokes (he called himself “Mr. Sundance” when leaving messages for her), his dismissiveness toward his stardom (“I would say to him, ‘Hey, Movie Star, make me a drink,’ and he’d laugh”), and his obvious guilt about the affair. And she remembered his postcoital salutation: “It’s heart attack time.”

In her writing, Bacon measured herself against Joanne, bragging, “He left her at a party and came to my house… he missed a plane he was to catch with her because he was in my bed.” But she recognized that she was on the outside looking in, a fact underscored for her once when she was dancing at the Factory and Newman walked in “with Joanne and about four or five of his six kids.” And she knew too that she was destined to be dumped: “He was really a square. He was really sinning. And he was always drunk.” So she moved house and went on with her life, even as he kept calling and visiting. And when she finally decided to end things by telling him, falsely, that she was getting married, he said, according to her account, “Great. Good luck. Hey—could we get together a couple of times more before you do it?”

This was stupefying stuff, and there wasn’t apparently much that could be done about it. The Newmans didn’t take out any ads to counter Bacon’s assertions. They didn’t sue her or the magazine that
printed her accusations or the others who reported them. Rather, they went on vacation—without the kids—to London, their honeymoon site, as soon as production on their film wrapped.
*
Newman was still harboring guilty feelings about the failure of his first marriage. He wasn’t going to give up a second one, even if it was he who had placed it in jeopardy.

Much of the work that went into mending things between them was undertaken, obviously, in private. But with their publicist, Warren Cowan, the Newmans hit on a strategy of guarded openness about their marriage with select press—especially women’s magazines and female reporters from major news outlets. (In this way they directly countered Bacon’s original story, which was written in the first person and explicitly addressed to an imagined woman reading it in a beauty salon.) Within a year of the Joyce Haber column and its unchecked rumors, the Newmans were regularly giving interviews to
Good Housekeeping, Redbook, McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan
, and once,
Playgirl.
They would share and be frank, but they would do so on their own terms and in venues of their own choosing.

For instance: “Joanne and I have had difficult, body-bending confrontations,” Newman told Maureen Dowd some years later in
The New York Times Magazine.
“But we haven’t surrendered. I’ve packed up and left a few times, and then I realize I have no place to go, and I’m back in ten minutes.”

And: “Being Mrs. Paul Newman has its good and bad days,” Joanne told
Good Housekeeping.
“Obviously, since we’re still together, most of them have been good. But it hasn’t been easy, and I don’t think any valid relationship is.”

As with
Rachel
, Newman demonstrated his loyalty by committing himself to Joanne’s work. Almost everything he would produce or direct going forward would include her. And he learned to accommodate her interests and moods just as she had always tolerated his specific ways and tastes; he encouraged her love of ballet by attending dance
recitals, by giving her gifts of ballet-inspired artworks, and by helping her to fund a dance company of her own.

It would often be praised as a fairy-tale marriage. And perhaps because it contained and overcame a dark and perilous episode, it was worthy of the name.

T
HAT FALL
Newman took Joanne on a trip to San Francisco so that he could be fêted at the San Francisco Film Festival. One thousand folks at the Palace of Fine Arts theater watched a couple of hours of clips from his career—all of it, including
The Silver Chalice
and
WUSA.
Newman took questions afterward. There were parties—a private do in John Foreman’s suite at the Mark Hopkins (Newman drank beer), then a hop up a hill somewhere to the mansion of some festival board members (Newman stopped the limo at a grocery store so he could grab a sixer), then another party someplace else, complete with a Black Watch Piper. Later in the weekend there was the premiere of a Newman-Foreman production,
Puzzle of a Downfall Child
, in which photographer Jerry Schatzberg directed his girlfriend, Faye Dunaway, as a fashion model who makes it big and then has an emotional breakdown.

As usual, the sheer presence of Newman wowed the locals. At the fancy party a society matron who’d been heard sniffing about “movie people” went absolutely speechless when introduced to him. In the hotel the staff were so dazzled that they sought relics of him. “They even took the dental floss out of the trash can,” a friend recalled. “I don’t think many people could handle that as well as Paul.” He demonstrated a bit of heroism, or at least Eagle Scout–ishness, when he was visiting Ghirardelli Square with Joanne and reunited a lost girl with her mother; the woman, who was in a panic, was so stunned by the appearance of Newman with her daughter on his shoulders that she stammered a thank-you and walked away without the child. “Haven’t you forgotten something?” Newman asked her.

N
EWMAN WAS
inordinately proud of
WUSA
, which he several times described as the “most important” picture he’d ever done. A story
about race, social unrest, changing morals, and political demagoguery in New Orleans, it had cost $4.8 million to make, partly because so much of it was shot on location. It had meant to shake up America’s sense of itself as a nation being overrun by tyranny, but it was a clumsy, shrill, confused, and unappealing picture that barely got a release. Newman had fought Paramount Pictures to get the thing made, accusing executives at the studio of cowardice. “There aren’t many smart people who have power,” he declared to the studio’s vice president for production, Peter Bart, “and you have to use your power to advance truth. What’s money and power worth if you don’t do that?” But Newman was one of very few people convinced of the film’s incomprehensible sexual and racial politics. And nobody found the film entertaining. Even the genteel Vincent Canby went out of his way to slap at it, writing an essay about its half-baked politics and excoriating its “self-conscious pretensions” and “narrative incoherence.”

Still, Newman was fond of Robert Stone’s vision and language, and he was drawn into another film with a similar pedigree, a true American epic with as much to say about the national character and the changing times as it did about nature, family, physical daring, literary narrative, and indeed English prose itself.
Sometimes a Great Notion
was the second novel of the wrestler, vagabond, poet, and prankster Ken Kesey, a brawny, earthy, foxy American original cut, in some ways, like Newman himself: handsome, unpretentious, educated, and as connected as someone of his talent, position, and fame could be to the common ground from which he had sprung. Various filmmakers had been struggling for a couple years to bring his classic first novel,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, to the screen (there had been a successful Broadway adaptation starring Kirk Douglas in 1963), but that task seemed a lark compared to attempting to make a film of
Notion
, a sprawling novel of dense stylistic experimentation and shaggy, parochial narrative.