Paul Newman (6 page)

T
O COMMEMORATE
this triumph, and the many other vivid impressions he made on Kenyon in his three years there, Newman was granted by the editors of the
Collegian
the rare privilege of writing what was dubbed “A Brief Autobiographical Encomium,” a comic sketch about himself published on the front page of the paper as a farewell to the school. Written in a mock-heroic style and filled with references to boozing and fisticuffs and womanizing and his famed escapades as a laundryman and an actor, it was at once a throwaway and an unintentional confession. Making reference to the brawl at the Sunset Club, he half-joked, “The people at home began to wonder what kind of company I was keeping. And people who were keeping company with me began to wonder what kind of company
they
were keeping.” He spoke of his turn to the theater—“I modestly nick named myself ‘Barrymore’”—and ended by bragging about the most unlikely achievement in his entire Kenyon career: being named to the Merit List as a first-semester senior for maintaining an average grade above B. “‘Merit list!’ My dream come true.”

Later, when the ninety-fourth edition of
Reveille
, the school’s yearbook, was published, the editors ran two pictures of him beside a drawing of a hand mixing a cocktail and bade him adieu thus:

“Paul L. Newman, Perennial T-Barracks master of ceremonies, itinerant laundryman, antagonist of roommates and proctors alike, author of musical review, leading actor in dramatic productions, host to innumerable parties and never one to miss the opportunity for a fast buck are just a few of Paul’s endearing charms. Prone to getting out of hand on long and trying evenings.”

Over the years he would say of Kenyon, “My days there were the happiest of my life,” and he would maintain strong ties to the school. He had entered as a confused young navy vet trudging thoughtlessly toward a career selling sporting goods and had transformed, accidentally but purposefully, into someone with an increasing set of skills and a genuine aim in life.

He wasn’t going back to Cleveland to sell golf clubs and microscopes at Newman-Stern.

He was going off to summer stock theater in Wisconsin.

He was going to try to become an actor.

H
E WAS TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN
preparing for whatever life it was that was lined up for the heirs to Newman-Stern. Instead, he was on a train headed to Williams Bay, Wisconsin, where he’d received a room-and-board scholarship for a season of summer stock at the Belfry Theater.

All of Art Newman’s lessons about responsibility and dedication seemed, apparently, to have been in vain. The boy who was never quite able to do the right thing was now throwing his upbringing and education away on a chimera, a quixotic pursuit of art and self-identity more suited to a bohemian or a bum than a college graduate from Shaker Heights. Art’s response, as his son recalled, was “consternation.”

But it may not have been so severe as all that. For one thing, this wasn’t Newman’s first stab at semiprofessional acting, and his father may have indulged his decision to pursue his chosen path. In the summer after his junior year, he had performed in stock at the Priscilla Beach Theater in Plymouth, Massachusetts. There, according to fellow trouper Terry Lewis, “he told us that he had made a deal with his family. They would support him for a year while he was trying to be an actor, but after the year he either had to go back and work at the store, like his brother, Art, or he was on his own.”

Certainly the idea that Newman’s future lay either in acting or in the aisles of Newman-Stern rings true. He would forever explain his choice of a potential career not as a calling to thespianism but as a
flight from the path that had been lying in wait for him his entire life. “I grew up with the idea that I was going into the sporting goods store,” he confessed. “My whole family, including a couple of uncles, took it for granted.” But that seemed like a trap, and he was too squirrelly by nature to accept that he should simply walk into it. Acting had brought him success at Kenyon; maybe he could keep riding that unlikely streak of good results.

“I wasn’t ‘searching for my identity,’” he’d later say. “I didn’t have greasepaint in my blood. I was just running away from the family retail business and from merchandising. I just couldn’t find any romance in it. Acting was a happy alternative to a way of life that meant nothing to me.” He confessed that the taste of his college triumphs lingered: “I was instinctively pursuing the only thing I’d ever done really well.” But mainly, he would admit, “I didn’t quite know what to do.”

So he wound up in Williams Bay, a lakeside vacation spot for well-to-do Chicagoans, and right away they put him to work. His first role was as a soldier in Norman Krasna’s
John Loves Mary.
Next he was cast as the Gentleman Caller in Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie.
In all he stayed nine weeks in Wisconsin and probably appeared in as many plays, and directed a little bit, and came to develop a dislike for the hectic routine of stock acting. Years later, when he was appearing on Broadway, he reflected, “I think the only thing you can do with those, in such a short time to prepare, is to develop your bad mannerisms, or discover possibly successful mannerisms—but mannerisms nevertheless. Sure, what can you do in four days of rehearsal? You can hope to Christ that you can remember your lines, and that’s about as far as it goes.”

But when the season closed, he decided to stick with the hectic schedule of repertory acting. He moved on to Woodstock, Illinois, an outerlying city of northwest Chicagoland, the longtime home of
Dick Tracy
creator Chester Gould and the fictional birthplace of the famed comic strip lawman. There, in an old-fashioned town center that would someday be the location for the film
Groundhog Day
, stood the Opera House, built in 1889 and home for decades to the Woodstock Players, a troupe that had included among its ranks Tom Bosley, Shelley
Berman, and just the previous season a promising young actress named Geraldine Page.
*

And he wouldn’t make the trip to Illinois alone. He brought with him a tall, dark-eyed blonde he’d met in Williams Bay, an aspiring actress named Jacqueline Emily Witte who would, on December 27, 1949, become the first Mrs. Paul Newman.

They married at an anomalous moment in his life, to say the very least. By all accounts, they were both attractive, and they both claimed theatrical professions on their marriage license, so they were matched in some ways. But Jackie, as she was known, had only turned nineteen at the end of that summer, and she hadn’t yet graduated Lawrence College, the liberal arts school from which she was on vacation when she went off to Williams Bay. She was born in Illinois and raised in Beloit, Wisconsin, the oldest child of Frank T. Witte and the former Irene Elizabeth Telgman. Frank was one of five sons of Theopolis and Emma Witte and had joined his father in the family business, Witte and Son, a Beloit butcher shop. Frank and Irene weren’t young parents; when Jacqueline was born in September 1929, he was forty-one and she was thirty-five, and they had been married for ten years. Surely they shared some apprehensions as they watched, along with best man Art Newman Jr., as this handsome but unsettled couple exchanged rings and vows at the family church, St. Paul’s Episcopal.

Even with Kenyon and the navy behind him, even with his good looks and athletic build, Newman still wasn’t what folks would have called a ladies’ man. During vacations from college, his high school chum Don Mitchell remembered running into him regularly at Louie’s, a restaurant-tavern-dance hall on the eastern edge of Shaker Heights. “The rule there was that you couldn’t go into the dance hall if you were a guy without a girl,” said Mitchell. “And he’d always be in the bar with the other guys who didn’t have a date.” Given that, there have been various surmises over the years as to just what led Newman
to marry so quickly and to someone so young. Pregnancy is a popular first guess, given the era and the midwestern morality that was in place. But no child was imminent. Newman accrued no advantage professionally or as a veteran for being married. One of his snarkier biographers has suggested that Newman wed Jackie out of homosexual panic, having gotten a sense of how many gay men there were in the theatrical world and how they would treat a handsome, fit young newcomer whom they suspected might be available. But the simplest explanation, if also the most conventional, is best: they were in love, and they could imagine staying together and being in love together for the rest of their lives. There’s no record of whether Art and Theresa Newman attended the wedding, but Art might very well have been pleased to think that his younger son was now responsible for somebody else’s welfare. It might straighten the boy out.

S
OMETHING MIGHT
have to, because acting in stock companies wasn’t exactly the path to stability and security. What’s more, even in the context of the Woodstock Players, Newman didn’t make a stunning impression. “There wasn’t much to set him apart from the rest of them that were here at the time,” recalled W. H. “Bill” Tammeus, in whose house the newlywed Newmans rented a pair of rooms for $10 a month during their time in Illinois. “He was one of about twenty here during that period … and about fifteen were pretty equal in their accomplishments.”

Karin, the oldest Tammeus child, remembered that the Newmans “were both very beautiful people in all ways. She was lovely and quiet, and he and my dad were real comfortable with each other.” The Tammeus family lived just a couple of blocks from the Opera House, and they supported the institution with membership in the Theater Guild and by regularly housing actors in their rambling thirteen-room Civil War–era house. The young Newmans slept in an upstairs bedroom, had access to a second kitchen in the basement, and shared the house’s one bathroom with the Tammeuses and their four children.

Shared it, as in literally. Barbara, the Tammeuses’ second oldest, remembered, “When I about seven years old, on a warm, sunny afternoon,
I was taking one of my monthly baths and was scrunched down in the water enjoying what I hated to do, take a bath. The door to the bathroom off the kitchen opened, then closed, and Paul, reading a
Time
magazine, dressed in his usual blue jeans and white undershirt and [with] bare feet, walked to the john and sat down. Moments later when I rose up out of the water, he said, obviously not having seen me on his way in, ‘Oh, hi. Well, I’m going to finish.’ And he did. He then got up, walked out while still reading
Time
, and didn’t say another word.”

The Players’ shows were poorly attended. Kurt Wanieck managed the theater, and he had hired Newman, who, he remembered, “was just a good-lookin’ blue-eyed guy.” According to Wanieck, the bugaboo wasn’t the quality of the productions or the choice of material but rather TV. By 1948 more than one million television sets were in use in the United States, with four national networks broadcasting programs featuring such overnight stars as Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan. “People just started to stay home to get their entertainment,” Wanieck said.

The movie business took a hit—1948 would be the year in which it sold fewer tickets than any other since, even with the American population increasing annually. And live theaters got hit even worse. “If twenty or thirty people came out, that was a good showing,” Bill Tammeus remembered. But like Newman, he blamed not Uncle Miltie for the poor turnout but rather the pace of the Opera House production schedule: sixteen shows in sixteen weeks. He depicted a company “trying to learn the stuff by heart in a hurry… They put on too many plays in too short a period of time. It was a different play every week.” Among the quickly revolving slate of shows was
Our Town
, in which Newman played the Stage Manager (and in which Karin Tammeus had a role), and
Cyrano de Bergerac
, in which Newman was cast rather uncomfortably to type as the attractive but dim-witted would-be courtier Christian. “Paul was not a leading man,” Tammeus stated bluntly.

But he was a trouper: Newman was keen on sitting up nights and talking about the latest production with Jackie and the other actors. “The best thing he could do while he was here was eat popcorn,” Tammeus said. “That guy would eat a dishpan full of popcorn at least once a day. When they came home about midnight after the play, he would make the popcorn and go up to his room to talk about the play, eat
popcorn, and have a beer.” As the winter season came to a close, Newman found that he needed to supplement his diminishing earnings as an actor, and so he took work at Bill Tittle’s farm just outside town. “He shocked grain like any other farmer would,” Tammeus recalled.
*

The image of him out in those fields in early 1950 doing the work of a laborer seems unlikely, but at some level the quiet of the outdoors and the dulling routine of farm work must have come as welcome distractions. Sometime that winter he learned that Jackie was pregnant. And in the spring, just as he was looking for another summer theatrical job, he got a terrible phone call at the Tammeus house: Art Newman had died.

“I remember it really clearly,” Karin said. “It was five or six in the evening, and he was speaking on the phone in the kitchen, and then he sat at the table to talk with my parents. He realized that might be the end of his career. He felt that he would have to go back and take over the family business, and that horrified him.”

The next day, with his pregnant wife and his empty sack of prospects, he drove home to Cleveland in a 1937 Packard he’d bought for $150. “They just left,” Karin remembered. “It was just a very sad day for all of us.”

A
RT
N
EWMAN
had fallen ill suddenly about six weeks prior, his stomach swelling and his complexion taking on a jaundiced cast. Doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital, admitting to being puzzled by his symptoms, suspected fibrosis of the pancreas and/or the liver and/or colitis and/or cancer. A number of steps were followed: blood transfusions, intravenous feeding, a shunt for the bile that was accumulating in his abdomen. Joe Newman was alarmed by his brother’s worsening condition and the doctors’ failure to identify the causes. In mid-April he wrote to specialists in other cities and was considering taking Art to Boston for care.

But Art’s disease was moving too quickly. On May 1 he was back in St. Luke’s. At 9:20
A.M.
on May 11, he died. In the coming days, obituaries appeared in the
Plain Dealer
, the
News
, and the
Press
, as well as in the city’s Jewish papers, the
Independent
and the
Review and Observer.
Alongside most ran a recent picture of a man looking older and more shrunken than his age would indicate. But the
Plain Dealer
ran an archival photo from a decade or two earlier that showed him as a balding but still vital man with his jaw and gaze set firmly.

The funeral service was held on a warm, showery morning. It was a Sunday—Mother’s Day—and the Newman-Stern Company was advertising sales on everything you’d need for summer fun: fishing and camping and golf gear, baseball cleats, tennis rackets. After a service at the Deutsch Funeral Home, Art was interred in the mausoleum at Mayfield Cemetery in Cleveland Heights, not far from the graves of his parents. In the coming days Joe Newman wrote poignantly of his pain to a business acquaintance, “Art was not only my brother but my business partner for thirty-five years. His loss in both services will be difficult to make up, if, indeed, it can ever be made up. In all these years we never had a quarrel.”