Paul Newman (36 page)

Newman was truly fond of the film. “I’m not usually happy with my work,” he said, “but I loved that movie. It rates
very
high as something in which I took great personal satisfaction.” The secret, he thought, was that “the picture was the star of the picture.” He did harbor one regret from the shoot, though: he’d begun to swear too much, even at home. “You get a hangover from a character like that,” he said, “and you simply don’t get rid of it. I knew I had a problem when I turned to my daughter one day and said, ‘Please pass the fucking salt.’”

T
HE PACE
of his life was incredible. At the same time that he was skating and drinking with the boys of
Slap Shot
, he became a founding member of the Energy Action Caucus, a group that was trying to counteract the impact of big oil lobbying on the political process, with special focus on the environmental consequences of some oil industry practices. Along with a group of five others, described in the press as “liberal businessmen,” Newman donated some money and helped raise some more to give the group $500,000 in funding for its lobbying activities in Washington. That summer he popped up at several events during the Democratic National Convention, which nominated Jimmy Carter at Madison Square Garden. He had done a little campaigning for Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general (and fellow director on the board of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions) who ran unsuccessfully for a Senate seat from New York. In January 1977, when Carter was inaugurated as president, both Newman and Joanne spoke at the star-choked gala held that night. (His old political sparring buddy John Wayne gave a speech at the event, declaring his allegiance to the new president as a member of the “loyal opposition.” “That was simply the class act of the evening,” Newman said admiringly. “I never forgot that.”)

The following year, knowing of his long interest in halting nuclear proliferation, Carter’s White House asked Newman to serve as
a so-called “public delegate” at an upcoming United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Disarmament. He would be seated alongside Andrew Young, then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, W. Averell Harriman, George McGovern, and Charles W. Whalen, a Republican congressman from Ohio. For the five-week appointment he would be paid approximately $5,000 in salary and living expenses (which would not be a problem, since he owned an apartment mere blocks from the UN). In preparation he attended a briefing at the White House and happened to bump into the president as he was walking through a corridor. “What are you doing here?” Carter asked him. “Nothing.” “Why don’t you come on up?” He went into the Oval Office for what he felt was a rare opportunity to discuss the arms race with the leader of the free world, only to find out that the president was just like virtually everyone else he met outside of Hollywood: “I wanted to talk to him about SALT II,
*
and he wanted to talk about how you made movies.”

During his tenure at the UN, Newman was respectful, private, and alert. As ever, he was afraid of being over his head in something. “I’m just learning the job,” he told a reporter. “I’m trying to feel my way in.” He realized he was out of his element and that his participation could be seen as frivolous. “I’m not a great negotiator,” he admitted, “and I’m not a great drafter of initiatives. But I can get on the idiot box, and my goal is to spotlight what is going on at the UN.”

Of course, he could cause a commotion simply by walking through the halls of the place. But when he finally was charged with making a major presentation, he spoke to a relatively small crowd about the United States’ offer of its ground-based and satellite-surveillance technologies to help monitor the compliance of signatory countries to arms treaties. The speech was reportedly read in a monotone, but it was well received—and he did get a bigger crowd than Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko had, which was something of a coup. But in general the permanent staffs of bureaucrats and diplomats seemed not
to miss him when his tenure was over. “He’s a wonderful person, I’m sure, and I love his movies,” said a Latin American ambassador. “Need I say more?”
*

A
S AUTUMN
approached and the racing season ended, Newman went off with Robert Altman again to make
Quintet
, as bizarre and wrongheaded a career choice as he’d ever made. Set in a frozen, desolate, postapocalyptic future, it starred Newman as a seal hunter who arrives in a city with a populace facing certain extinction. Life has been reduced to crude basics, enlivened only by a cryptic game called “quintet,” which is played for life-and-death stakes. Filmed in Quebec, it boasted a cast of international stars—including Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson, and Vittorio Gassman—but it flopped everywhere. The stolid sense of gloom and existential angst that pervaded the film; the nearly collegiate arbitrariness of its story line and plot; the wooden dialogue that was meant to be gnomic—it made for neither great art nor the sort of food for thought that brings adventurous moviegoers out of their homes. And Vincent Canby of the
New York Times
went out of his way to rip the film twice in two weeks, comparing it to “all the terrible little-theater plays I’d seen in my youth.”

Funny he should mention the theater. Not long after completing work on
Quintet
, Newman found himself directing a play for the first time since he’d been a graduate student at Yale. And he was doing so at, of all places, the Bolton Theater, the brand-new facility on the campus of Kenyon College.

Newman had never let go of memories of Kenyon, and he kept in touch with the school. Starting in 1958, Kenyon began granting the Paul Newman Award to the best student actor of the year. The following year President F. Edward Lund of the college offered to present Newman with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at the
spring 1960 commencement. He wrote back that he’d be in Israel on the proposed date. The following winter Lund wrote him again, and he replied that he was uncertain about his availability:

But in fact he was available, and along with Joanne and his brother, Art, and Art’s then-wife, Margie, he was at Kenyon on that date, accepting an honorary doctorate predicated by these encomia:

The Kenyon brass weren’t entirely sentimental in their motives; internal correspondence of college officials discussed their plans for asking Newman for money. He complied to the generous tune of $10,000. And a decade later he sent more money to fund a Joanne Woodward Award for the best female student performance at the Coordinate College, a women’s school affiliated with Kenyon.
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In 1975 he was back on campus for a single day, flying in from Connecticut to nearby Mount Vernon, Ohio (site of the epochal Sunset Club brawl), to confer with school officials, including his old drama instructor and director James Michael, about the possibility of a new theater to replace the antiquated Hill Theater inside the Speech Building, where Newman had performed so memorably as an undergraduate. The reception was low-key and homey: Newman, dressed in denim, had a lunch of beer and sandwiches, sat on a lawn “rapping” with the college drama club, then met to discuss nuts and bolts, dollars and cents, with college president William G. Caples.

They were trying to coax him into donating enough to build the theater—about $2 million would be required—or, barring that, to allow them to name the building after him. He balked at both suggestions. Would he appear in the premiere production? No, he said, but he’d be willing to
direct
the premiere production for free. “It’s less than we wanted,” Newman recalled being told. “But more than I can afford,” he responded.

His visit generated headlines, though, and those headlines gave the theater project traction. Eventually the necessary sum was raised, in large part through a grant from Cleveland industrialist Kenyon (Kenny) C. Bolton, a third-generation member of the college’s board of trustees. An additional $20,000 for the premiere production was awarded by the Ford Foundation.

With the Ford money the college hired Ted Walch, a 1963 graduate who had been running the summer theatrical programs at Kenyon for several seasons. For material Walch managed to secure the services of writer Michael Cristofer, whose current play,
The Shadow Box
, was enjoying its initial run in New York en route to winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Cristofer had appeared in several summertime productions at Kenyon as a young actor (although he was never a student at the school) and happened to be in Gambier to witness the ground-breaking for the new theater when he learned of
The Shadow Box
’s success with the Pulitzer jury. He agreed to provide a completely new script based on an idea about a forgotten character of the American past, a 1920s entrepreneur and showman who had barnstormed with Red Grange and Bill Tilden and promoted a cross-country walking
race in 1928 that became known as the Bunion Derby:
C. C. Pyle and the Bunion Derby
, it would be called.
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And Newman, reminded of his promise of a couple years earlier, committed to coming back to Gambier to direct the finished play.

T
ALK ABOUT
second boyhoods: Newman made several visits to Gambier in the summer and fall, then arrived on the first of November, planning to stay for upward of a month. He brought along a portable sauna and installed it in the antique-filled house of Kate Allen right in the middle of Gambier. (He never made his bed, she reported, but he always apologized for the failure.) He tried as much as possible to blend in, going for beers and pizzas, and beers and burgers, and beers and popcorn at the hamlet’s watering holes, the Village Inn and Pirates Cove. (His own old haunt, Dorothy’s, had long since closed down.) He was part of college life—or, at least, as much of it as he could enjoy without disrupting it with his mere presence; he attended a glee club concert and one of the monthly Sunday brunches at which students and faculty mixed. He invited folks over for grilled steaks and burgers and popcorn and beer and vintage wine. “We adults in the project would get together almost every night,” Walch remembered, “and Paul was like a little kid, organizing it: ‘I’ll make the burgers and salad, and you guys do the rest.’” He screened
Rachel, Rachel
in the big campus assembly hall one night and took questions from students, even producing Joanne from the audience to join in the Q&A.

Thrill of thrills, he was named honorary coach of the football team on November 11. Coach Tom McHugh allowed him to give the boys in purple a pep talk before the game, and he told them about his own ignominious career (including a game against Otterbein College, when the opponents scored against Kenyon so often that they ran out of the fireworks they lit to celebrate touchdowns), promised to fill the locker room with Jacqueline Bissets if they won, and admonished the
players to “go out there and beat the shit out of them.” Kenyon beat Bethany of West Virginia 34–33—huzzah!—but alas, no Jackie Bissets appeared.

With the theater people he was even more generous with his time and resources. He forked out for the construction of a turntable in the stage, as well as $12,000 toward video equipment to record the making of the play. He worked with the various craft departments, sewed costumes, painted scenery, and donated his weekly allotment of ten cases of Budweiser to the cast and crew.

Naturally he worked closest with Cristofer and the actors. Two professionals were in the cast—John Considine as C. C. Pyle and New York stage actress Susan Sharkey as Euphemia, his wife. James Michael, who had just retired from teaching, would play Pyle’s father. And the remainder of the roles were filled by students, all of whom Newman knew by name instantly and would greet matter-of-factly on campus as they went about their days. (Among the cast was a lanky young actress from Dayton, Ohio, who passed her audition by explaining to speedcrazy Newman that she’d made the three-and-a-half-hour trip in two hours and forty-five minutes; her name was Allison Janney.)

The young actors were shocked and flattered by the treatment they got from the superstar. He would provide them with handwritten notes after rehearsals, or take them aside individually after they’d run through a scene to give advice or propose ideas. “He’s an actor’s coach,” opined Michael. “The thing he does best is the intense one-on-one. In rehearsals there are a lot of people around, almost like a movie set. He’ll go up onstage and tell an actor something in a quiet voice. It’s something like movie directing.” Indeed, Newman had a tendency, noted by several cast and crew members, to use movie lingo in his direction, saying “roll ’em,” “put a wrap on that,” “you’ve moved out of your frame,” and so forth. But Considine remembered that Newman offered him an especially helpful bit of direction right at the start: “He said to me, ‘I think C. C. Pyle has itchy palms,’ and that was a nice little physical thing for me to work with.”

But for all the control he exercised, he was ceaselessly collegial. Ted Walch said, “One of the fabulous things about Paul is that if Michael [Cristofer] or I thought something was wrong with a scene, we’d feel
no compunction about telling him. He loves to listen. He can say he was wrong.” He could get a laugh out of them. When they were working on a scene in which Red Grange made a sudden appearance among the contestants in the coast-to-coast race, he told them, “Think that you’re meeting a big superstar…like Robert Redford.” And he could shock them, too, with his sense of being just another guy working on the show. When Chris Smith, who had a small role, invited Newman to hear his singing group, Newman failed to show up; the next day a car driving past Smith near campus came to a sudden stop, and Newman jumped out with an apology: “Hey, Chris! Sorry I didn’t make it. But I have a good excuse.” (Smith gave him the needle: “What kind of excuse can you, Paul Newman, have for not coming to see us?”) As Thomas Turgeon, a drama professor at the school put it, “He’s practically one of them.”