Dropped Names (27 page)

PAUL NEWMAN

T
here are countless examples of the lengths so many once-beautiful women go to preserve what is impossible to recapture. Great male beauties don't suffer in quite the same way, but they suffer nonetheless. There are, of course, compensations in old age: wisdom, family, good friends, achievement, wealth. But my experience of the great beauties I have known, male and female, is that each would forfeit those perks to be magnificent once more.

Paul Newman's beauty was original and mesmerizing and, in my experience of him, he was master of and slave to it. I first met him when he was casting a film in which his wife, Joanne Woodward, would star and he would direct, entitled
Rachel, Rachel
. The year was 1967. Paul was forty-two. I was twenty-nine.

Twenty minutes late getting to their Upper East Side apartment from their house in Connecticut, he came through the door, dropping bags, deeply apologetic, pulling off his sunglasses, and there they were—those compelling baby blues, completely and utterly beautiful; as was the rest of him. I didn't get the part but I did come to know Paul, after a fashion.

I doubt there was much in life that Paul was denied. To watch women in his presence was to forever put to rest the notion that men are shallow, only caring about a woman's face and body while women look for those deeper substitutes like “a sense of humor” or “kindness.” Physical beauty takes the cake with first meetings. Getting past it is another matter. And it was hard for most people to get past it with Paul.

He certainly did everything he could to distract their attention; changing his looks for roles, goofing around on talk shows, dressing with no particular flair. But apart from not having much of a behind, he was male perfection.

Over the years he stayed gorgeous with the help of intelligent plastic surgery and a vigorous health regimen. He loved dirty jokes—the dirtier the better. When I knew he was coming to a show, I made sure to have at least three ready for him. And he liked to hear conquest stories. “Did you score?” was his usual question about any mentioned leading lady I'd worked with.

He was a great audience, a true lover of acting and actors, and wanted, I believe, to be thought of as a great actor. He wasn't. But he gave everything he had to every role. As his movie star days faded and he turned to mostly stage and television projects, his limitations became more apparent.

As indeed, they were in life. After dirty-sexy jokes, shop talk, cars, or politics were exhausted, Paul was a pretty dull companion. Never rude or unkind, just dull. The lights would go out and he was in for the night. He had drunk enough beer or heard enough jokes and that was it.

But he was so beautiful, people thought it must be their fault if he went silent or just emptily gazed at them.

Apart from his many visits backstage, I was in his company perhaps only a dozen times over the years I knew him. And I was always the first to leave the scene. You knew you were with a deeply feeling man, a decent man and a man of principle, but like the statue of David, there he stood, physically perfect but emotionally vacant. There were so many arenas in which he would not play that eventually I did what I could to avoid any prolonged contact with him.

Another reason I did not pursue a friendship of consequence with Paul was that I felt that to be his friend meant being many things I was not. Those being a beer-drinking, sports-loving, charity-driven, race-car-junkie acolyte. It seemed to me that, in the end, he could only go so far inside himself and could only be with people who could tolerate that limitation in him. Even when he didn't want to be, he was the center of every universe and his circle continually waltzed around him, accepting their leader on his face value, so to speak.

I
n 1991, I was appearing in a play at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. It was about a raging tyrannical actor at the turn of the century named Junius Brutus Booth. Paul came to see it without Joanne or one of his usual cronies. He walked me to my car in the almost empty dark parking lot and as we strolled along he put his hand on my shoulder, then moved it to the back of my neck, squeezed it hard, and shook it.

“Where does all that anger come from, Franco?”

“I wouldn't know where to start,” I said.

“You scared me tonight up there.”

“Well, you know, it's acting,” I joked.

“Yeah, but you can at least let it out. I can't.”

“What's your anger about?” I asked.

“I wouldn't know where to start.”

P
aul loved the craft of acting but the burden he carried was not, in my opinion, his good looks. He had no danger. And it is essential for a great actor. Non-beauties like Jack Palance and James Cagney had it. And Paul's major rivals in his early years—Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Steve McQueen—all had it. And all self-destructed. Paul lived to eighty-three years old within a healthy lifestyle, and I'm convinced he knew he was without greatness. And that very lack of danger in him may explain why, as beautiful as he was, he personally had very little sex appeal.

T
he last time I saw him was in a small off-Broadway lobby. It was a windy, wintry night. His illness had begun. He was standing behind me.

“Franco, my boy.”

I turned around and looked into the baby blues I'd looked into some forty years earlier. An old man now, face thin and ravaged, a beard for his next role, fine sparse hair blown around by the wind.

“Paulo,” I said, and instinctively reached up to put his hair in place, smoothing it down with my fingers and making it neat. I then moved my hands down to his cold cheeks and kissed them both. He fixed me with a look of heartbreaking tenderness and I thought for a moment he might be fighting back tears.

“There. Now you look like Paul Newman,” I said. “And what man wouldn't want to look like Paul Newman?”

It occurs to me now, as I write this, that perhaps he might have been that man.

WILLIAM GIBSON

A
tall, rangy man came loping down the aisle carrying a manila envelope one afternoon during the summer of 1966 in a break from rehearsal of Thornton Wilder's
The Skin of Our Teeth
in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He handed it to our director, Arthur Penn, who was sitting in the front row. Arthur did not get up, but opened the envelope, looked over its contents, and began a conversation with the man who stood dutifully in front of him.

The visitor, dressed like a handyman or janitor, had a handsome, craggy, face with a slightly protruding jawline and possessed atop his friendly eyes, a pair of shaggy-dog brows. He and Arthur had a five- or ten-minute conversation, during which he never sat down. I assumed he was the theatre's all-purpose old codger. He was, in fact, William Gibson, author of
The Miracle Worker
and
Two for the Seesaw
, two enormous Broadway hits, and he was at the ripe old age of fifty-two.

Bill and his wife, Margaret, lived in a house ten minutes from the theatre, halfway down a long, unkempt dirt path called Clark Road, at the end of which lived Arthur and his wife, Peggy.

Bill and Margaret's house was a broken-down, big two-story rambling mess. It was painted deep dark green with white trim lattice work covering the windows, and had a circular driveway over which there was some kind of wooden arbor. An unkempt stone-laden front patio, with a stock of fireplace logs Bill had cut himself, was overrun with weeds. At its rear was a white door taking you inside to a kitchen and office, which led to an indoor pool set inside a jungle of plants and vegetation of all kinds. Broken-down chairs and small tables sat around a gigantic stone fireplace and the slanted, heavy plastic sheets that covered the whole environment were constantly dripping from the condensation that was never solved in all the years I visited there. It was steamy hot in the summers and ice cold in the winters. A wooden spiral staircase ascended from it to the upstairs bedrooms. Past the kitchen was another porch, the heart of the house, where everyone gathered to eat and talk just about every night.

Bill sat through those nights in his favorite rocking chair, pipe in hand, with an expression of bemused delight and often hilarious comment. He was, the more you came to know him, a complex and sly fellow. His long, thin, perfectly proportioned body gave him a country-boy sexuality and his great charm lay in his seeming unawareness of his physical attraction. The ubiquitous pipe protruding from his mouth added to the cozy package.

Not far from the house was Bill's work studio. It was there he had written
The Miracle Worker
and
Two for the Seesaw
and was then writing a biography of his family life called
A Mass for the Dead
. I was asked to visit that studio from time to time, and in its tiny quarters, sitting opposite him in front of a small woodstove, I listened to chapters, talked plays and playwrights, but mostly loved the company of a man who was never thought of as a great writer, never celebrated much in his lifetime, and suffered that slight more profoundly than I had realized in the early, heady years of getting to know him.

There was, indeed, a certain preciousness about his writing, a sort of self-conscious, somewhat labored effort at poetic pronouncements that made it feel overripe and pretentious. He resolutely wrote every day of his life, safe on the page; an Irish lad from the tenements of New York with the soul of a poet and some inner tensions that brought on a bad case of bleeding ulcers.

Through the years he made brief sojourns to New York, but mostly hibernated in that little studio. If I wanted to see him, it would have to be in Stockbridge. I made fewer and fewer visits as the decades rocketed by, but stayed in touch by phone every few months.

His wife with whom he'd had two sons, Tom and Dan, predeceased him following a long illness. Bill became her devoted nursemaid and his life revolved around her comfort and care. When she finally passed on, he said to me:

“It's as if I looked at a map of the world and suddenly France was no longer there.” Then he said, quoting Carl Sandburg, “I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.”

After Margaret's death, he slowly deteriorated and with each call he listed hilariously the breakdown of all his body parts. He was now in his nineties and the hearing was going; there was cancer; there was a new horror, it seemed, every year. Our phone calls, however, were still full of humor and fond reminiscences of his contemporaries' pasts. He remembered a French girl I'd brought up to see him in the early 1970s.

“Whatever happened to that little Frenchie you were banging?” he said. “I banged a couple of little ones in my time too.”

“Have you ever had a homosexual experience?” I asked.

“Jesus, no, my boy. But after a long meeting in New York with Larry Olivier about taking
Two for the Seesaw
to London we were walking back to his hotel and he asked me up to his room.”

“What did you do?”

“Blushed, turned, and ran.”

I
n the fall of 2008, I drove to Stockbridge. One of his caretakers had called to say that he was permanently bedridden and in and out of consciousness. If I wanted to see him I'd better come soon.

Forty years after my first visit to that house on Clark Road, I made my way slowly along the still unkempt path to the large, dark green house. Nothing had altered. It was, in fact, so unchanged that a wooden sled leaning up against the outer kitchen door stood exactly where I had remembered it residing. I walked the same steps through the same patio and opened the same unlocked white door with the lattice work X's on the windows, and entered the kitchen.

The house was silent. It was approximately 11 a.m. The porch, where there had been such riotous good times and where Margaret had convalesced and died, was returned to its former self. I wandered the rest of the ground floor—primitive paintings on the wall, small Mexican throws on the tattered couches, stacks of sheet music piled under the piano where Bill used to sit and pound out ragtime. Upstairs too. Bedrooms small, old quilts, broken lamps, and books by the thousands.

I returned to the kitchen and walked toward the back room off the pool to see if perhaps someone might be there. In the doorway, I stopped and stared at William Gibson, now ninety-three, lying in a hospital bed, several rosy plaid blankets tucked under his chin. His head seemed less than half its normal size, and the ends of his shoulders looked barely eighteen inches apart. He could not have been more than seventy-five pounds. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and his face was so blotched and bruised with red and brown patches, it looked as if he'd been beaten by a bunch of thugs.

I sat for close to half an hour alone with him, looking and listening to the slow, steady rasp of his breath. Suddenly his eyes opened and stared up at the ceiling. I got up and leaned over into his direct line of vision, expecting a vacant stare, and instead this strong Irish voice said:

“Frankie! You look so young!”

“Well, I'm not,” I said. “I'm seventy.”

“That's young,” he said.

And he drifted back to sleep.

His eyes opened again, but he was not lucid this time. He raised his head off the bed a bit and looked at a glass of orange juice on the table next to him. I brought it to his lips. He wanted to hold the straw so I pulled one of his arms outside the covers and as I did, they fell back to reveal a body in such ruin that if a Hollywood makeup artist had created the look, he would have been accused of sensationalism.

It was as if he had been beaten about his chest and shoulders and then a match had been taken to the raw skin. I could see not an ounce of what looked like normal flesh.

His son, Tom, now in his fifties, came into the room from his little cottage on the property, and we sat across from Bill for two hours as he went in and out of consciousness and lucidity. A long, rambling diatribe on the workings of bladder medication followed by a clear two minutes of reminiscences. And then he was gone again. During one of the rambling monologues Tom and I looked across at each other and burst into laughter.

I waited for a reemergence of recognition. It never came. So I kissed his forehead and left a house I'd first entered in 1966. A house in which the same black telephone had sat on the same small counter in the kitchen with the same number for over forty years. As I drove down Clark Road knowing I would never see him again, I remembered that our history together went even further back than our first meeting in 1966. Somewhere around 1946, Bill had written an early draft of a play entitled
A Cry of Players
about the young William Shakespeare. Margaret saw an actor in a workshop in New York and told Bill he would be the perfect Will. When they met at a coffee shop in the Village, the actor declined the role. “I'm going to be a movie star,” he said. His name was Marlon Brando. Twenty years later Bill revised the play and rewrote it with me in mind, asking Anne Bancroft to play Will's wife, Anne Hathaway. We performed it at Lincoln Center in 1967 and I was fond of telling people that Bill had written it for me. He gave me a copy of the play inscribed:

To Frankie,

For whom I wrote this play when he was, would you believe, eight years old.

—
Billy

He died at ninety-four. A man consistently and comfortably incapable of artifice.