Authors: Shawn Levy
Now she was ready, and the Newmans acquired her land, bringing their holdings up to nearly fifteen acres, plus the two main houses and the out-buildings on both properties. They built a footbridge across the river—after hassling with the town over where the hundred-year high-water mark should be set—and gradually turned the newly acquired house into their main residence, giving their original house to their girls as a home for holidays and vacations. In time they converted
several of the buildings on the new property; Joanne had a dance studio, Newman installed thousands of dollars’ worth of fitness equipment, and there was a barn that they turned into a screening room/rec room/guesthouse. It was a world unto itself.
They had another property too, also expensive: Far West Farms in West Salem, just over the border from Connecticut in Westchester County, New York. A fifty-four-acre riding school and horse farm, it boasted a riding arena, stables, a Grand Prix jumping course, and business facilities. The farm operated as a business, but it was also a family playground. Joanne rode, as did Lissy and especially Clea, who was becoming one of the most accomplished show-jumping riders of her age, competing regularly for national titles in the sport.
What with the horses to feed and transport, and the expense of new property and new construction in Westport, and the ongoing cost of auto racing—which was threatening to balloon as Newman considered adding the responsibilities of owning and operating a race team to his driving career—there came a sense of fiscal reality: Newman hadn’t been managing his career well for some time. It had been more than six years since he’d had an agent in Hollywood; in that time his movie deals had been made through his production companies and overseen by lawyers and business managers.
In 1980, though, he reversed himself and signed with the most powerful and cutthroat agent since Lew Wasserman, Newman’s original hired killer, had left the business: Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency, the Death Star of the Hollywood agenting business. Ovitz was nothing like Freddie Fields, the likable, kibitzy fellow who’d previously looked after Newman’s movie deals. Rather, like an old-time studio boss, he was a warrior willing to crush anyone to get his way. He studied martial arts and philosophies of war. He operated like a ninja: quiet, decisive, deadly. Newman once described Ovitz, admiringly, as “a combination of barracuda and Mother Teresa.” And he learned right from the start just how valuable it was to have such a fellow working for you.
For the first deal that he cut for Newman, Ovitz delivered a whopper: $3 million or 15 percent of the gross, for him to appear as a veteran policeman navigating a perilous course of romance, mentorship, loyalty, justice, and appalling crime in the treacherous terrain of New
York’s worst ghetto, in a film called
Fort Apache the Bronx.
Considering that Newman hadn’t starred in a genuine hit since
The Towering Inferno
and that he was fresh on the heels of the deadly one-two of
Quintet
and
When Time Ran Out…
, this was a staggering deal. But it also marked a transformative moment in Newman’s work, in which his characteristic attraction to top-flight collaborators and socially compelling themes melded with an enriched acting style born of the experience of three decades in front of movie cameras and the real sense of loss and mortality with which he’d been struck when Scott died. The massive fees Ovitz would wrest from movie studios were almost secondary. As each of his next films would reveal, Newman had begun to evolve into not only a new style of acting but a new version of himself.
F
ORT APACHE
was made of the raw stuff that could help Newman scour his résumé of his recent cinematic missteps. The South Bronx of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a blighted-out urban hellhole, so decayed and desolate that people compared it to Dresden or Tokyo after World War II. Jimmy Carter had visited the place as president in 1977 as if it had been the site of an earthquake or a hurricane and pledged aid and restoration. But there wasn’t much hope for change. A script about life in the local police station—the 41st Precinct, nicknamed Fort Apache by the cops assigned there
*
—had been floating around for a few years; at one time Steve McQueen had been attached to star. David Susskind, the former agent and talk show host turned producer, set the film up at 20th Century–Fox with a budget in the range of $15 million—a big chunk of which, of course, would go to Newman.
The story was loosely based on the experiences of two detectives, Tom Mulhearn and Peter Tessitore, who had each put in several years at the 41st; a series of rewrites of former journalist Heywood Gould’s original script led to the version that director Daniel Petrie would
shoot. Opposite Newman, the filmmakers sought a dynamic younger actor to play his protégé and, as events unfold, conscience. John Travolta was considered, but the part eventually went to the actor Ken Wahl. Ed Asner was cast as the precinct commander; Danny Aiello, a Bronx native, as a cop with a sadistic bent; and newcomer Rachel Ticotin as the Puerto Rican nurse with whom Newman’s character has a brief and painful fling.
The film began shooting in March 1980 on location in the Bronx, a choice that might have been intended in part as an economic boon for the community but that turned out to have distracting consequences for the film. A couple of weeks into production, copies of the script leaked out to various community groups, and they were incensed at what they saw as a racist attack on the people of the South Bronx. They complained to the filmmakers that all of the black and Hispanic characters in the film were criminals or junkies or bad guys, while the largely white police force was depicted as besieged and helpless. The filmmakers met with the protesters, who had formed a group called the Committee Against Fort Apache, and found themselves at loggerheads; the committee wanted changes to the script, but Susskind and Petrie wouldn’t accommodate them. CAFA escalated by sending picketers to the set to disrupt filming: when Petrie called for action, they would start chanting, “Get out of the Bronx.” Next CAFA filed a libel suit against the production in the New York State Supreme Court; William Kunstler argued their case.
The attacks on the film made great fodder for journalists. The
New York Post
was especially keen on the story, as it showed Newman and Asner, famed advocates of liberal political causes, to be hypocritical about helping the urban poor when their own paydays hung in the balance. Newman tried to countervail the protests and actually invited one of the most fiery—and desperate-looking—picketers into his trailer to discuss the issues; he managed to turn the fellow around. But it wasn’t enough. On April 7 Newman took part in a press conference on the set intended to defend the film from CAFA’s attacks. “It is not a racist picture,” he contended. “It is tough on Puerto Ricans, blacks, and the neighborhood, but the two villains are Irish cops who throw a Puerto Rican off a roof.” He explained that a movie about police work
would necessarily focus on criminals, prostitutes, and drug users, and that he was hopeful that making the film would open the eyes of audiences to the very real problems the South Bronx was facing. “About 90 percent of the people in this country don’t know what urban blight is,” he said, pointing out that the area policed by the 41st Precinct had neither a hospital nor a high school in its boundaries.
But this sort of pleading only made the protests seem based in something true. And when Newman admitted later on that he truly knew nothing about the South Bronx (“To realize that you live on its doorstep and never realize what’s going on inside your own city came as something of a shock to me”), he wasn’t strengthening his position. CAFA’s lawsuit was dismissed by the court—the judge commented that it contained “only speculative connotations and ideological innuendo”—but the production had work to do to make things right with the community. Newman met with a representative of the Ford Foundation, which was investing in South Bronx community groups and even funding home-ownership programs in the area, and he was sufficiently impressed to insist on two changes in the film: adding a disclaimer at the start of the film that declared that the South Bronx had many individuals and groups who were working to improve the community and giving lines to Asner citing the honest citizens of the neighborhood as the reason that the officers of the 41st needed to be exemplary.
But when the film came out the following February, protesters picketed the Manhattan theater where it was supposed to have its premiere. (“Supposed to” because the management of the theater—which stood in one of the poshest parts of the Upper East Side—had passed on booking the film and instead sent it uptown to a theater in a more racially and economically diverse neighborhood.) They were joined in their condemnation of the film by no less a cinema maven than Mayor Ed Koch, who agreed that it was a racist movie but wasn’t worried that audiences would be fooled by it: “People can smell something that is not kosher. This film is not kosher.”
The box office vindicated Koch, unfortunately, totaling less than $30 million.
Fort Apache
had some quite good scenes—real tension having to do with the killing by the cops, a climactic standoff with
gunmen in a hospital, and a last-minute tragedy that brought out an especially poignant reaction in Newman’s character. But it felt like a message picture too, at a time when that genre was distinctly out of favor with the public.
F
EELING THAT
he had been badly burned by the press, and particularly by the
Post
, Newman must have been especially pleased when, at the end of the 1981 auto-racing season, Ovitz presented him with the offer to replace Al Pacino in a film about journalistic malfeasance that was to shoot in Miami during the winter.
Absence of Malice
was based on a script by Kurt Luedtke, a former executive editor of the
Detroit Free Press
, and dealt with an investigative reporter who is manipulated by a federal investigator into putting pressure on a private citizen in order to jump-start a stalled Justice Department probe. As a result of the newspaper’s decision to run a front-page story claiming that the man was the suspect in an infamous unsolved crime, the fellow, who has done nothing wrong, loses his business and sees a good friend commit suicide. He finds that he must fight back by framing the prosecutors and the newspaper in the same way that they attempted to frame him.
Newman had taken potshots at the press before; after Scott’s death, he objected to a
Newsweek
article about his time directing at Kenyon by writing a letter to the magazine, which it published, in which he declared, “I’ve canceled my subscription to
Newsweek
and replaced it with
Screw
magazine. At least that publication doesn’t have any pretensions about what it is.” He was pretty keen, then, to play Michael Gallagher, the gangster’s son—and legitimate businessman—wronged by the press and the government. A substantial cast was assembled: Sally Field as the reporter, whose violations of professional ethics would include actually sleeping with the fellow she was writing about; Bob Balaban as the nervous and unscrupulous prosecutor who used Gallagher as a Judas goat; and Wilford Brimley as the Justice Department official who must sort the whole mess out.
Sydney Pollack directed, meaning that the performances would be of guaranteed quality but that a certain slickness and patness would pervade. He and the producers actually rewrote and reshot the ending
after test-screening audiences balked at the notion that Gallagher and the reporter had no chance to reconcile; a tacky little hopeful coda was included in the final cut. That said, they left tough stuff in: in one grueling scene Gallagher physically attacks the reporter, coming close to rape. As Field recalled, Newman “had to push me around and he really didn’t want to do it. He was so afraid he would hurt me, he could have cared less what the scene was. I had to act like such a booger, and he finally did it. I was completely black-and-blue, but I couldn’t let him know so he wouldn’t feel bad.”
If the shoot went smoothly, the release was another matter. When the film came out at the end of 1981, in time for the Oscar season, Columbia Pictures decided to launch it with a luncheon for the press at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Newman refused to shake the hand of the woman representing the
New York Post
, telling her, “I hate your paper,” and ignoring her questions. He assailed a reporter from the
Village Voice
who he claimed, wrongly, had misquoted him in a story about the
Fort Apache
controversy (the writer
had
written an unfavorable story, but Newman was not quoted in it); the fellow was so rattled that he stood up and left rather than submit to more of Newman’s scorn. Newman didn’t care who knew why he’d made the picture. “The movie was a direct attack on the
New York Post,”
he acknowledged. “I was emotionally receptive to doing a piece about sloppy journalism. I wish I could sue the
Post
, but it’s awfully hard to sue a garbage can.”
The attack on journalism in
Absence of Malice
occasioned a lot of soul-searching in the newspaper trade, which was, as ever, eager to critique itself in public. But press critics who searched the film for cautionary lessons generally came away satisfied that the script distorted their work. Newman knew they’d close ranks against him. “They protect themselves just like doctors, dentists, and gangsters,” he said, “and not necessarily in that order.” He had one more plan for revenge on the
Post
and its owner, Rupert Murdoch: “What someone might do is invent something, something really insulting. Like Murdoch can’t spell and has to carry a pocket dictionary. That he got picked up at a very early age for having sex with chickens.” It would not be the last skirmish of the war.
The sensational off screen aspects of
Fort Apache
and
Absence of Malice
nearly obscured the fact that Newman had delivered two remarkable performances in 1981: tough and feeling and cunning and desperate in turns, with moments of profound emotion and thoroughly realistic spontaneity throughout. It had been at least a decade since he’d been so good in two pictures, and he was good in a way that he’d never really been before: contained and disciplined and sinking into the sides and backgrounds of movies rather than dominating their centers. There was no doubt about his stardom, about the power of his lean, handsome appearance, about the steel and gravel in his voice. But there was something truly poignant in the spectacle of a middle-aged Newman with frailties and problems and vulnerabilities. Perhaps because of the pain in his private life, he had developed a spare style in his maturity, as if the death of Scott had killed off the eternal adolescent inside him.
Malice
earned him an Academy Award nomination—his fifth overall and first since
Cool Hand Luke—
and although he didn’t win (Henry Fonda won his only competitive Oscar for his final role, in
On Golden Pond
, that year), he had demonstrated clearly that he was back in fighting trim—and in a new guise. “I was always a character actor,” he told a reporter. “I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.” Now, having been battered inside and out by life and aging, he could, ironically, feel more comfortable in his skin and his craft.