Paul Newman’s recent “retirement” statement sounded more wistful than emphatic: “You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that’s pretty much a closed book for me.” He was alluding only to his acting career, whose movie phase began in 1955 with “The Silver Chalice,” a misleading dud, and has long overshadowed his theater and television performances.
Perhaps the valedictory Newman movie role will be last year’s vocal characterization of a wise old racing car, Doc Hudson, in the Pixar animated comedy “Cars.” At 82, he’s more likely to remain plausible, even irresistible, as savvy old-timers called Doc than provocative upstarts named Rocky Graziano, Ben Quick or Fast Eddie Felson.
Presumably, Mr. Newman intends to remain open for business as a food manufacturer and philanthropist. He could play catch-up as a memoirist. Two decades ago the screenwriter Stewart Stern agreed to organize biographical material for the actor, a friend and occasional collaborator since the 1950s.
The writer mentioned his preliminary biographical work for the actor in a 1989 book titled “No Tricks in My Pocket: Paul Newman Directs,” a chronicle of rehearsals for the 1986 movie version of “The Glass Menagerie,” intended in part to preserve Joanne Woodward’s performance in a theatrical revival. Far from idle in the two decades that followed the “Menagerie” project, Mr. Newman might consider having a go at an autobiography.
Fifty years of movie stardom is a rarity. About a third of Paul Newman’s 60-odd movies are likely to prove durably entertaining. The fact that the Newman-Woodward marriage has also lasted almost half a century gives the couple an enviable claim on public esteem. The odds against this sort of durability are prohibitive among movie stars.
Spectators who liked them from the start — and it would have been ludicrous not to appreciate their freshness and promise if you went to the movies in the 1950s — have every reason to savor their initial romantic rapport, preserved in “The Long Hot Summer” of 1958. Their courtship scenes remain exceptionally witty, pleasurable and persuasive, confirming an authentic attachment that was also destined to last.
Still an “item” during the production of “The Long Hot Summer,” based in Baton Rouge, La., in the fall of 1957, the couple married early the next year. Everything started coming up roses in the wake of the ceremony: the immediate popularity of the film itself, released in March; Miss Woodward’s Academy Award for “The Three Faces of Eve”; and Mr. Newman’s all-but-forgotten Cannes Festival acting prize for playing Ben Quick, that happiest of opportunists, in “Long Hot Summer.” In large part because of the Newman-Woodward match, the movie’s lack of fidelity to its famous literary source, William Faulkner, became blithely excusable.
The DVD edition of the film touches base with Mr. Newman and Miss Woodward in a featurette made for Turner Classic Movies a few years ago.
At the press junket for their last major co-starring vehicle, “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge,” in 1992, Joanne Woodward recalled, “Over the years Paul and I have acted together endlessly. It’s always fun. The burden just rolls away.”
Paul Newman had been photogenically and temperamentally arresting from the outset. Not even the torpid “Silver Chalice” could conceal some kind of brooding and good-looking potential. But he had been ill-served by Warner Bros., the studio that signed him to a long-term contract. The send-off might have been different — and more historic. He tested for the role in “East of Eden” that made James Dean a star in 1955. He might also have been an eye-opening choice as Mr. Dean’s older brother — the audition material collected for the “Eden” DVD suggests as much. It also suggests that Mr. Newman might have emerged as the more attractive presence and thrown the finished film out of whack.
Mr. Newman returned to New York after the disillusionment of “Silver Chalice” and resumed frequent TV roles. A year later, he got a crowd-pleasing second chance in Hollywood as boxer Graziano in “Somebody up There Likes Me.” Its success also owed something to television: the real Graziano had become a lovable pug fixture as Martha Raye’s boyfriend on her comedy-variety series. In a way, audiences had been warmed up for the Rocky back story.
Typically, this breakthrough role had also come at another studio, MGM. A subsequent loan-out to Metro provided Mr. Newman with an additional big hit in 1958: playing hard-to-get in his pajamas opposite love-starved Elizabeth Taylor in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” This was a peerless glamour match at the time and never repeated, curiously enough, in years to come.
Mr. Newman’s preposterously tormented character, Brick, always had better love scenes with his father, Big Daddy. Much more seems to be at stake when Paul Newman is emoting with Burl Ives than Elizabeth Taylor.
Mr. Newman remade one of his teleplays, “The Death of Billy the Kid,” at Warners, retitled “The Left-Handed Gun” and directed by Arthur Penn, whose inventive and disquieting flair for violence was evident in the best sequences. In retrospect, the actor’s attraction to impulsive, anti-social figures such as roughneck Rocky and psychopathic Billy seems to leave him overmatched. He’s more believable as knowing, calculating, socially astute protagonists, whether they belong to the Deep South of “The Long Hot Summer,” the Far West of “Hud” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the legal world of Philadelphia in “The Young Philadelphians” or the expatriate jazz scene of Paris in “Paris Blues,” where he portrayed an unattainable object of passion for Miss Woodward.
Self-confident, contemplative character traits ultimately flattered him more than explosive or overemotional displays, and it didn’t hurt that the self-confidence spilled over into cockiness and insolence, as it did so distinctively in “The Long Hot Summer” and “The Hustler.” Even a certain kind of hardheartedness worked for him, notably in “Paris Blues” and “Hud.”
Mr. Newman hasn’t been immune to stinkers, and they ganged up on him absurdly at the end of the 1970s when “Quintet” and “When Time Ran Out” cried out to be mercifully forgotten.
Despite the slip-ups, Paul Newman has been resourceful and fortunate enough to get second-wind roles time and again: “The Sting,” “Slap Shot,” “Absence of Malice,” “The Verdict,” “The Color of Money,” “Blaze,” “Nobody’s Fool.” The upshot has been an exceptionally satisfying career.
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