Pride Unprejudiced

	..MCN Reviews
	..Movie City Indie

Shawn Levy on Paul Newman: A Life

Longtime Oregonian film critic Shawn Levy's latest of five nonfiction volumes is Paul Newman: A Life, (Harmony Books, $29.99) (Earlier titles include King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis.)

In the first complete biography of the actor, director and philanthropist, Levy has observed that Newman was a lot like Lewis, or Frank Sinatra, whom he wrote about in Rat Pack Confidential: "Men like this have incredible capacities for work and activity."

Levy expects there's probably a scurrilous book in the works, but he says the man and the life that he found in extensive research, poring over archives, articles, interviews, letters, legal documents and his own interviews. Paul Newman: A Life is a straightforward, no-nonsense read with a satisfying amount of detail in its 490 pages, including unexpectedly memorable anecdotes from collaborators like John Malkovich and novelist Richard Russo. This exchange is from May 2-3. [Disclosure: I offered leads while Levy was writing the book, and I'm thanked in the acknowledgements.]

PRIDE: What made Newman such a looker?

LEVY: There were the genes, of course: the first instance of what he called Newman's Luck. And the metabolism. And he did take good care of himself; he was sufficiently bourgeois to attend to his instrument daily, as it were, with exercise, the famous face-in-ice-water treatment, and so on. He even claimed that he kept his hair—despite having a bald dad and brother—by keeping it short and brushing it vigorously. But, too, he had great style: casual, a bit sloppy, but classic. Even in the height of the sixties and seventies he didn't get wild with his clothes, unlike, say, Frank Sinatra who sang on TV once wearing a Nehru jacket and love beads. Newman wears gaudy outfits in Slap Shot and it's meant as a joke. Dressers on some of his films after the eighties complained that it was hard to make him look disheveled. Of all his gifts, that face, that hair, those eyes and that body were first and, he knew, very crucial. He truly had nothing to do with them, and they made him world famous.

PRIDE: A writer spends a lot of time with a subject when they embark on a biography. Tell me a little about how your perspective shifts. Do you like the figures more or less on any given revelation or discovery? Did your admiration for Newman grow or lessen? And of course, Jerry Lewis: friend or foe?

LEVY: You begin to get the smell of a fellow after a while, and you start to develop a sense of what he would-wouldn't say-do-think-feel. In the case of Lewis, I interviewed him for about five hours in two sessions at the beginning of my work and it was completely hair-raising and made me realize that all the bizarre and dark and unflattering things I came to hear in the coming years might have a basis in truth.

I never spoke to Newman, and I had decided to treat him at a respectful remove from the get-go (I started the book in November, 2005); I became more impressed with him gradually as I researched and, this is the real test, because this is when they haunt your dreams, began to write about him. And then I found myself, unfortunately, completing the book as his cancer developed and became public and, finally, took him [away] about six weeks before I finished the first draft. It was an ordeal, in a sense, and a privilege. Remember, my last book was about a gigolo-bagman-money-grabber-likely murderer—Porfirio Rubirosa. So the idea of Newman as a saint in that company isn't far-fetched.

PRIDE: What is the most eccentric or most gratifying piece of ephemera you dug up? I remember you saying something about haunting the vintage stores of Cleveland and coming up with a junior high yearbook?

LEVY: I learned that Newman once had a partial interest in a nightclub, The Factory, in Santa Monica during the heyday of the Sunset Strip clubs. (His partners included Pierre Salinger, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr., and a young Richard Donner.) It was a true swinging hotspot but died with its era (a spin-off club in Chicago, under the same name, was held up by gunmen on opening night and never really took off after that). I learned about his racing career, which was formidable both behind the wheel and as a team owner. I learned that he was a nail-biter. I learned that he played the Stage Manager in Our Town—his final Broadway role—for the first time in stock theater in Woodstock, Illinois, in 1949. Those sorts of things.

PRIDE: How tall was Newman? Is it just the bad internets having a field day lately with varying estimates?

LEVY: I think that in the fullness of his time he stood about five ten-and-a-half or a smidge taller. But by the time the N. Y. Post started taking potshots at him for being short, he was nearing 60 and probably had ceded an inch or two to age.

PRIDE: What do you think was the best response he ever made about the longevity of his marriage to Miss Woodward?

LEVY: He often talked about patience and laughter and the need for the occasional air-it-out quarrel. He seemed genuinely to marvel at Joanne's many talents and mutability. And he regretted that "hamburger, steak" quote for years. He learned his lesson: Interviewed by Maureen Dowd in the mid-eighties, he said of Joanne, "She's like a classy '62 Bordeaux. No, make it a '59. That's a year that ages well in the bottle.' Then he asked, "Will I get in trouble for that?"

PRIDE: If you had met him, would there have been some sort of affirmation, versus a question, that you would have been compelled to offer him?

LEVY: It would not be in my power to give Paul Newman an affirmation other than to say that as a father and husband and observer of the film world and the world in general I found him completely admirable. I don't think it would matter to him, though.

PRIDE: How underappreciated is his work as a director-producer?

LEVY: It is underappreciated, particularly inasmuch as it was almost all done as independent production, almost always of high quality, almost always based on fine literary material, and almost always with Joanne Woodward in the lead or a key role. Some of his films are worth seeing repeatedly, I think: Rachel, Rachel and The Glass Menagerie especially. Only one really doesn't hold up well: Harry and Son. But his films as a director are much like his films as an actor in that you can always understand what he was thinking when he launched the project and that the aims and intent were always quite high and true and rare. He produced mainly for himself, with partners such as Martin Ritt, John Foreman and David Brown. And the handful of things that he produced that he didn't appear in or work on hasn't necessarily stood up well. But when he was fully engaged, there was quality to appreciate even if the finished films weren't without flaw.

PRIDE: He may be the only figure outside of billionaires to have dedicated over a quarter-billion dollars to charity. What struck you most about that feat of generosity as you researched and learned more?

LEVY: It's closer to a half-billion, for starters: the $260-ish million that Newman's Own has given away in 25-plus years and his own personal interest in the company, which was valued in tax reports at $119 million and which he surrendered to his foundation in two payments just a few years before his death (indeed, before his illness). I admired especially the personal, even whimsical (to use one of his favorite words) way he and A. E. Hotchner meted out charity: sitting around a ping-pong table around Thanksgiving time and looking for places where they could really do some good in accord with their principles, aesthetics, politics and simple human decency. And the Hole in the Wall camps—which Newman's Own can only fund to a finite percentage for tax reasons—are extraordinary testaments to everything that he believed and hoped for and achieved. There's a book of letters from campers to Newman, and I think even Dick Cheney would break down crying after sampling just a few pages from it.

May 6 , 2009