There is a growing place for sadness as we age. The illnesses and the passing of family members, friends and acquaintances plumb its depth. Perhaps one reason I’m drawn to the movies on TCM, even if I’ve seen them, is the actors are frozen in time. There is a sense of comfort and familiarity.
I am not a star-struck person, although during my lifetime I’ve casually met some Hollywood luminaries, such as Yul Brenner who was my seat mate on an Eastern Airlines shuttle flight, and once we attended the Academy Awards as my company published their annual index to those awards.
But my more substantial casual meeting was with Joanne Woodward when we published Westport, Connecticut: The Story of a New England Town's Rise to Prominence. In addition to her being a prominent actress (and wife of Paul Newman), she was very active in the Westport Country Playhouse and the Westport Historical Society and wrote the Forward for the book. We had a publication party and I spent part of an afternoon in May 2000 with her, and toured the Historical Society with her as a guide, chatting about their early years in Westport and the coincidence that we were once neighbors, both with homes along the Saugatuck River, separated by Weston Road. (Ann used to collect for United Fund in our immediate neighborhood and was assigned the Newman property, being warmly received by Joanne’s mother who lived in an adjacent house.)
During our three decades in Westport / Weston we saw Paul Newman in various venues, mostly restaurants. Ann once selected apples across a large bin with him at a local farm. We never bothered him. All we knew was the guy on the screen. Once he drove into our office parking lot in his modified VW Beetle with a Porsche engine. Unfortunately, one of the women who worked for us spotted him from our second-floor office window. And waited, along with others in the office for his return, and when he did, Ruthie (as I recall her name harking back to 1975 or so), ran out the door as he got into his car and said something to the effect “Oh, Mr. Newman, won’t you wave to the others standing at the windows?” I understand he actually got out of the car and with a forced grin, waved.
When he died, I wrote the following in this space: “The town treated him pretty much like anyone else and that is the way he wanted it. He was just there, around town, and of course larger than life on the screen, and because of his extensive charity work, even on bottles of salad dressing. He was such a part of the fabric of all of our lives. I feel a profound sense of loss whenever I think of him, or see him on the screen or on those bottles of “Newman’s Own” which he funded to last into perpetuity for the benefit of progressive causes. He was iconic and an iconoclast at the same time, a true maverick who lived his life the way he wanted, not the way Hollywood normally dictates.”
But the point of writing this present essay is that I just finished reading his memoir Paul Newman; The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man. Also, I recently learned that Sotheby’s is set to auction “more than 300 individual items that the legendary actors assembled and enjoyed throughout their 50-year marriage.” All of those items apparently come from their Connecticut home, the one Joanne and I talked about that afternoon.
Tragically, Joanne was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s sometime in 2007 and only a few days later Paul was diagnosed with terminal cancer; he died in 2008. Since then Ethan Hawke’s “The Last Movie Stars,” a six-part documentary about them was featured on HBO, and Newman’s memoir was published. The Sotheby’s auction is the last step in deconstructing lives which heretofore have been an enigma.
Paul Newman agreed to be interviewed by his friend Stewart Stern for the memoir and a substantial amount of oral history was transcribed, but Newman did not publish it during his lifetime and destroyed some and when Stern passed in 2015 some duplicate notes came in possession of the Newman Woodward family.
Their father wanted his children and grandchildren to understand his remoteness in his early years, his alcoholism, and to separate the man from the myth of a movie actor who had swagger and startling blue eyes. That demeanor was overcompensation for feelings of inadequacy, as he always felt his acting skills were suspect in getting parts – that it was his good looks alone that counted for his early success..
In compiling the memoir, the editor David Rosenthal relied as much on friends, family, and colleagues as he does on the transcript of Newman’s recollections. Nonetheless, the sense of the man comes through. What I quote below are Newman’s own recollections.
He recognized (and to some degree lamented) that “Newman’s luck” contributed to his success, being born white, with those baby blues, and the fact that when James Dean died, he got more opportunities to play roles that would have gone to Dean. He self-effacingly admits I never got the sense that anything I did on stage was spectacular or even something very exciting. It may have been workmanlike or OK, but was I really a highly highly knowledgeable actor? I was a kid with an attractive exterior, had a tremendous amount of energy and a lot of personality.
Corroborating what Joanne told me about their early years, some of it was a struggle. She didn’t go into specifics but Newman does. He and Joanne met on the set of the Broadway production of Picnic and their affair began while Paul was still married to his first wife. As he recalls, when I first got the job in Picnic, I had a wife and child (with another one on the way), and only $250 in the bank. I don’t know how long I would have been able to stay afloat without some financial cushion or if the play didn’t have a long run. I had even applied for a job at the Hillside Avenue branch of the US post office in Queens. Ironically, at the time that was my own neighborhood post office.
Newman’s life and my own emotionally intersect in the behavior of our mothers, his nicknamed Tress and mine, Penny. When his father was dying in a hospital he just needed to get Tress’ agreement to his estate plan, but she refused to sign anything; Tress kept yelling at him on his deathbed, accusing him and vilifying him. She wouldn’t let him fucking die! Although not exactly the same, that was essentially my mother’s reaction as my father died.
Another similarity was that his mother turned on his wife, as mine did on my wife. Tress was convinced that Joanne hated her and sought evidence. Joanne would occasionally go out with Gore Vidal (who was gay) to the theatre as Newman’s and Woodward’s relationship was still clandestine. At the opening of Ben Hur which Vidal co wrote, Tress noticed Gore and Joanne holding hands, chatting. Tress came to visit us in New York when I was on Broadway. We were driving one evening in my Volkswagen when suddenly my mother said to me “I know why your wife hates me! It’s because she’s having an affair with Gore Vidal.“ I slammed on the brakes and said “get out of the fucking car.” There were tears and apologies, but I still dropped her at the corner of 18th St., 5th Avenue.
My mother was quite a dame. She had an internal drummer, and that drummer was not affected by other reasons; there was a song going on with her and she stuck to it; if she thought something was going on in a certain way that’s the way it was it didn’t make any difference what actually happened; to her it wouldn’t change. And I didn’t speak to my mother again for 15 years.
Was it all because of what she said about Joanne? No, not really; but it was such a relief to use that as an excuse to escape from her. She represented all my leaden baggage, the parts of myself that I didn’t like, that sense of subservience, uncertainty, not knowing where the next attack was coming from or what the reason for it might be.
We too hardly spoke to my own mother for ten years, for similar reasons, the only way to protect my family. I know that feeling of relief as well.
Their marriage went through some rocky times, the drug overdose of his son, Scott, Newman’s own alcoholism and feeling like a fraud. But at his side, mostly always was Joanne, and he (they) battled through it and I think that with his 1982 film, The Verdict, in which he plays an alcoholic attorney, he finally got in touch with Paul Newman, the real person and real actor and his films and stage work from there on came from a different place. He also became a passionate and competent race car driver, and that swagger became more self-confidence. Then there was the development of his philanthropy, most prominent, his food enterprises, the profit from which goes to worthy causes and The Hole in the Wall Gang.
But even in his charitable endeavors he is self-effacing. I can afford to be charitable; I’m not going to be that really affected. Why will I suffer when I give away $10 million? That won’t change the way I live. I won’t eat less well. I can still stick a Buick engine in a Volvo. I’ve had the luck of the draw, living in a democracy, being of the majority color, having an opportunity for education, enjoying the Bill of Rights, the four freedoms, and everything else. The easiest thing I can do, frankly, is to give away money.
Yet he did it in a substantive way, more than most of his colleagues, and the endowment he created will live on.
We shared some of the same places and times and after all those years of living nearby the famous film legend, I too have finally gotten to know him. They were a unique couple but, in many ways, had ordinary lives and heartbreaks like the rest of us.
As the Woodward Newman Family state about the forthcoming auction, “Our parents have dedicated their lives to pursuing the things that inspired them, whether personally, professionally, or as collectors. We hope the public takes as much pleasure from this collection that our family has cherished for decades, which offers further insight into who they were beyond their glamorous Hollywood personas.”
