Aubrey Malone remembers Paul Newman on the 40th anniversary of the actor’ hard-won Oscar
Hard to believe it’s all of forty years since Paul Newman won his Oscar. It was for one of his more ordinary performances, that of pool shark Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s “The Colour of Money.” Scorsese showed us some brilliant special effects on the green baize, whizzing the cue ball off cushions as if it had a life of its own, and Newman was no slouch at the game in real life either, but his performance in the film – a sequel to Robert Rossen’s “The Hustler” in 1961 – left a lot to be desired.
In the 1986 film “Fast” Eddie is more an agent than a player. The playing duties are left to hot kid on the block Tom Cruise. But the black and white 1961 film is the one we mainly remember today. Newman had the excitement of a young Jimmy White in it. When I met Jimmy around the time “The Colour of Money” came out, he told me “The Hustler” was his favourite film.
The original movie also starred Newman. He was Oscar-nominated for that as well but didn’t win. The next time you’re in a pub quiz you might find this as a question: What actor was Oscar-nominated twice for playing the same character in two separate films?
Newman won for the wrong movie. Why? Woody Allen says Oscars are all about timing. He’s probably right. It’s also about who you’re up against. In 1961 Newman lost to Maximillian Schell for “Judgment at Nuremberg.” Schell gave the performance of his life here – and never bothered trying to match it afterwards. Sometimes an actor can galvanise himself for one supreme turn and then leave it at that.
After he did his first scene, Spencer Tracy (who was also in the film) said to Richard Widmark, “We’re in trouble.” Tracy was a good judge of acting – he saw Schell’s genius at work. Tracy was also nominated that year for “Judgment at Nuremberg.” When two actors are nominated for the same film it usually works against them as they split the vote. But not this time. Schell was too good.
Poster for the 1962 film Hud in which Paul Newman gave a critically acclaimed performance but once again missed out on the Oscar
Newman licked his wounds, going out into the night a beaten man. He’d already been nominated three years before for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” another sensational performance despite Hollywood bowdlerising Tennessee Williams’ script and concealing the fact that Newman’s character was gay (as he was in the play).
That year Newman had been up against Tracy too, for the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” They both lost to David Niven for “Separate Tables.”
It was a gross injustice. Niven’s part was fairly minor. Often the Academy gives the statuette to someone they figure will never be nominated again, like Niven. They felt Newman would be – and they were right.
In 1963 he was again Oscar shortlisted, this time for “Hud.” He played, as the poster put it, “A man with a barbed wire soul.” But he lost then too, this time to Sidney Poitier for “Lilies of the Field.” Again It was the wrong choice. Poitier was vanilla in the film. Newman had rarely been more credible – a seductive devil.
After he made the film he said he didn’t enjoy making the film because his character had no morals. It was an unusual thing to say. Playing villains gives actors much more leverage for experiment than playing heroes. Look at Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire” for instance. Interestingly enough, Brando poo-pooed that performance too, and for similar reasons, saying his character, Stanley Kowalski, was “a pig.” Brando was often identified with him in real life so maybe one can understand his frustration.
Newman was never identified with his character in “Hud,” however, going on to form a love affair with the American public if not the Oscar Academy in the years ahead. He became poignantly aware of the true priorities of life after losing his son Scott to a drug overdose. It changed the way he thought about everything afterwards. Scott aspired to be as successful as Paul but that didn’t happen. He became resentful of him as a result, leading to his life spiralling out of control.
His death spurred Newman on to doing all he could to help people. Along with his friend Aaron Hotchner he went on to make a fortune marketing salad dressing for charity, thereby becoming a kind of Saint Paul to the public. His marriage to Woodward was also cast iron – a rarity in Hollywood – and copperfastened the sense of his integrity.
“Our marriage works because we don’t see one another much,” he liked to say. That wasn’t true. The pair of them had a very old-fashioned marriage, preferring to stay in at nights rather than go out on the town. They also acted together, and formed an even further partnership when Paul started to direct Joanne, most notably in “Rachel Rachel”, for which she was Oscar nominated.
He was disgusted she didn’t win but by then she already had one, for “The Three Faces of Eve.” She used to jeer Paul about it, saying she got there before him.
He received another Oscar nomination in 1967 for playing a convict in “Cool Hand Luke.” Many people feel this was the best performance he ever gave but he lost to Rod Steiger for “In the Heat of the Night.” Once again the Oscar parade had passed him by. To add insult to injury, his co-star, George Kennedy, scooped a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, thereby becoming an overnight success after a decade or so toiling in the vineyard as a “second banana.”
How much more could Newman take? He made one of the most talked about films of his career in 1969, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” but there was no Oscar nod here either, despite it being nominated for Best Picture.
Posterity has come to see this ostensibly funny film as ushering in the death knell of the western genre, which gives it a kind of gravitas. The “freeze frame” deaths of Newman and his co-star Robert Redford, who went on to become lifelong friends in the aftermath of the film, was replicated in many films afterwards, most notably “Thelma and Louise”, a kind of distaff Butch and Sundance.
With Robert Redford in ‘Butch Cassody’ in 1969
The year before Newman finally won his Oscar he was given a Life Achievement Award, also known as the Deathbed Award, by the Screen Actors Guild. He didn’t like the sound of it, feeling his best work was, as he put it, “down the pike.” “I’m like a good cheese,” he sniggered, “just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.”
He was thinking about telling the Academy to put the so-called Deathbed Award where the monkey put the nuts but Joanne said that wouldn’t be clever, that if you rubbed the Academy up the wrong way they might wash their hands of you forever. Play the game instead and you might do well from them in the future. Her words proved prophetic.
At this point Newman felt there was a kind of Oscar blacklist against him. He thought it might have been caused by the fact that he never “went” Hollywood. He didn’t socialise much with actors and lived in Westport, Connecticut rather than Hollywood itself.
I lived in the town next to him in the summer of 1972, staying in a house rented by my brother in a town called Stratford. People told me that if I got up early enough on Saturday mornings and drove out to Westport I could see him mowing his lawn. I never got around to that, having had better things to do on Saturday mornings (i.e. snooze).
Stratford was twinned with Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare’s native town in England. There was a theatre there which Newman sometimes went to. That was another reason Hollywood had problems with him. Film people often think theatre people are pretentious whereas theatre people often see screen actors as philistines.
Newman straddled both divides. Dogged film buffs saw him as biting the hand that fed him.
There wasn’t much money in plays. He did them to recover from the mundanity of many of his film roles. Was this behind the Oscar’s slowness in giving him his Oscar? Arguably.
In 1973 he was in another hugely successful film, “The Sting,” again with Redford, but it didn’t have anything in it to stretch him as an actor. For the rest of the decade he seemed to coast, perhaps from frustration that his trivial roles were garnering mor attention than his serious ones.
1981 saw another Oscar nomination, this time for the forgettable “Absence of Malice,” and 1982 yet another one, for playing an ambulance-chasing lawyer in “The Verdict.” How could he not have won here? He was incredible as the washed-up alcoholic looking to reclaim a last vestige of dignity in a hospital corruption case.
Paul Newman made a fortune with his salad dressing, with all profits going to charity. ‘It’s grossed more than all my films put together’, he quipped
By now he must have thought his chances were gone forever but he didn’t let it get to him. On the contrary. Being passed over for the umpteenth time made him feel strangely nonchalant. To quote one of his most famous characters, “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”
Small wonder, then, that by now he was transferring his attention to his extra-curricular pursuits – theatre, directing… and foodstuffs. “The embarrassing thing,” he quipped, “is that my salad dressing is outgrossing my films.”
He also transferred his attention to car racing, like his rival Steve McQueen. Both McQueen and he had set up their own production companies in the sixties. They appeared together in “The Towering Inferno” in 1974. It was a blockbuster that was hugely successful at the box office but dismissed as junk by the critics. Paul and Steve just laughed their way to the bank.
Some actors spend their money on themselves. Newman used his, and his fame, to help others. This was most apparent in the late eighties when he formed his famous Hole in the Wall Gang Camps – a set of camps all over the world, including Ireland, to allow seriously ill children experience camp life.
As well as being an all round Good Guy he was one of the finest actors of his time. He was often compared to Brando but he knew in his heart he could never be in Brando’s class. “I became an actor,” he said once, “because I was bored with myself and wanted to get into other people’s skin.”
On another occasion he said, “I’m a character actor in a star’s body.” That was a more interesting quote. Because of that impossibly handsome face and those almost extra-terrestrial blue eyes, people often failed to take him seriously.
This was something that haunted him. Whenever autograph hunters asked him to take off his glasses for a photograph he felt he was being emotionally raped. When you’re synonomous with something, even a pair of baby blue eyes, it works against you doing anything else of more moment.
He broke out of that stranglehold often enough for it not to become an issue for him in any overall evaluation of his career but it remained a struggle, and perhaps best explains why he worked so hard “not” to be Paul Newman.
As well as being a great actor he was also a very funny man. Asked what he wanted written on his tombstone he said, “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned from blue to brown.”
