NEWMAN'S OWN WHO WASN'T

JOANNE WOODWARD, EDGAR DEGAS, AND ONCE UPON A TIME ...

(Above: Thornton Wilder, Joanne Woodward, and Paul Newman at the 10th anniversary party for Circle in the Square Theatre. 1961.)

I spent several days recently watching Ethan Hawke’s documentary series about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward on HBO. And I have spent several more days afterward realizing I missed their company. There is much to admire about the work they left behind on film. But I also loved their politics and sense of service and their settling in Connecticut and their commitment to the Westport Country Playhouse and, shod with stardom, the way they were able to shed it in the mudroom where it waited for them to take it back out into the world. There are not too many movie stars you could find in a photo with Thornton Wilder. I loved that about them, too.

I saw Newman on Broadway as the Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town which transferred there from the Westport Country Playhouse in 2002. He was wonderful in the part. It were as if he had done all that he had done before as an actor to prepare himself for this role onstage in what is to me the greatest play of the 20th century. He harbored the play in the grandness of his humility. The guy - and he was always “the guy” - had always harbored incongruity himself (maybe that is what drove him to drink, his awareness of that) so it was lovely to witness this final one he was embodying as an artist. A graduate of Kenyon College, Newman saved the Kenyon Review in 1993 with a financial contribution and later supported scholarships for talented and disadvantaged high school students in its Young Writers program. There was an essay about his performance in that production of Our Town in the Kenyon Review by Rebecca McClanahan. In it, she wrote: “When Paul Newman made his first appearance onstage, I had to look hard to find him. In a day or two, when critics review his performance, they will mention the quiet way he ‘insinuated’ himself onto the stage in semi-darkness, and how when the lights came up, he kept his back to the audience as he gave his opening lines, so as to short-circuit the applause that almost always greets a star’s entrance onto the Broadway stage. Newman’s behavior seems fitting not only because he is a self-effacing actor but also because the Stage Manager, though listed at the top of the cast list, isn’t really the star of the show, any more than God is the star of the Bible. I think of the Stage Manager not as a character but as an eye, a voice, a presence. Though housed in a body - in this case the lean, wiry frame of a vibrant septuagenarian - he seems bodiless. Occasionally, as if hungry to become part of the human drama, the Stage Manager slips into the skin of another character …”

In the Playbill for that production, Newman played down his being a movie star but his bio did mention that he was “married to the best actress on the planet.” But what must it have been like to be such an actress and to so many be seen as Paul Newman’s wife who never had top billing in their marriage? I think it meant that she was the one thing he could never own, this man who put his face on the Newman’s Own label of his popcorn and salad dressings and other products that benefit children who face adversity and since 1982 has donated over $570 million dollars to its causes. Yes, she fit into his life but she found a way to knit her own into it so she changed its pattern with her threaded presence. And she was not just the wife of a movie star but also of an alcoholic. I never thought of her in that way until I watched the series because I never had thought of him as being one. I was haunted by that aspect of their life since my own addiction and struggles at times with recovery have so haunted mine. I unexpectedly and deeply identified with that part of their lives. And now that I am in my late 60s, I was moved by how their glamorous, adventuresome, artistic lives led to endings of cancer for him and Alzheimer’s for her. I am more than haunted by her still living trapped within that disease. I feel hatred for her entrapment. Their glorious beginnings and the great luck of finding each other to share the longest stretch of their narrative could not stave off the fate of their final chapters. That too stuck with me from the series: the finality of fate.

Woodward did her own “Stage Manager” role when Martin Scorsese cast her as The Narrator for his version of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. In one of her voiceovers she remarked, “The past had come again into the present, as in through newly discovered caverns in Tuscany where children had lit bunches of straw and seen old images staring from the wall.” The first of that quote reminded me of the HBO series itself and how deftly Ethan Hawke brought her past into our present. The second part of the quote reminds me of the one encounter I had with Woodward.

The photo above is from the Billy Rose Theatre Division at The New York Public Library. A dear friend of mine, Ian Falconer, grew up in a house on a private island off the coast of Connecticut once owned by Rose. His parents became great friends with the Newman’s. His mother and Joanne were especially close. When I was Executive Editor of Interview magazine back in 1988, I was invited to a special preview viewing of the Degas exhibit that was inaugurating the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tisch Galleries. I ran into Ian’s mom and Woodward who had gotten there early as had I so we could view the work unencumbered by the invited throng but a throng nonetheless. Woodward, who loved dancing and dancers, loved the portraits of ballet dancers and even remarked how an early self-portrait of Degas reminded her a bit of “some guy from Shaker Heights.” Degas once insisted that “no art was ever less spontaneous than mine,” and it is lovely to recall walking through some of the exhibit that night with this remarkable actress who could make her own art seem spontaneous as all great actors can. As incongruous as her husband (they were artistic incongruity manifested as a couple), there was a studied spontaneity to Joanne Woodward as an actress to which I always responded. But that evening she possessed a pensive, almost sadness as she walked from painting to painting and peered into the portraits of bathers and jockeys and Russian dancers. When we got to “The Orchestra of the Opera,” she stared into its mysterious drama. Its odd angles. Its, yes, incongruities. I shared her silence. And then she grabbed my hand.

“What are you thinking,” I asked her.

And in that voice that summoned notes of a poor southern childhood as well as Edith Wharton, still forlorn somehow no matter how finally fortunate, she sighed and said, "Oh … I don’t know … once upon a time maybe. Doesn’t it all come down to that: once upon a time …”

When the Stage Manager in Our Town takes on the role as the minister in order to marry George and Emily, he contemplates marriage itself and says, “Do I believe in it? I don’t know. I suppose I do. M marries N. Millions of them. The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford - the first rheumatism - the grandchildren -the second rheumatism - the deathbed - the reading of the will - One in a thousand times it’s interesting.” Once upon a time Paul and Joanne were one in a thousand. What a burden that must have been, what a beautiful burden.