Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and the Perils of
the Power Couple
A documentary about their movie-star marriage charts
its electric beginnings at the Actors Studio and a half-century of fame’s
infinite rewards and shortfalls.
By Ginia
Bellafante
Ginia
Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics,
culture and life of New York City.
Aug. 12,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/12/nyregion/joanne-woodward-paul-newman.html
Like Harlem
in the 1930s or Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Manhattan’s theatrical
heart midway into the 20th century was where the ground was shaking, the place
where culture was being rewritten. Challenging provincialism and repression,
dismantling our holy mythologies and putting down the seeds for the revolution
that would bear fruit a decade later, American playwriting had acquired a
stature it had not had before and held onto only briefly. At the same time,
acting was also in the process of transformation, bending more aggressively
toward art rather than occupation under the direction of celebrated teachers —
Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner — who coaxed students toward a naturalistic
emotional lability that gave us Marlon Brando screaming “Stel-la!”
A regard
for realism favored the intensity of someone like Joanne Woodward, who arrived
in New York from the South in 1950 at the age of 19 and kissed the ground,
convinced she would become a star. Her recessive looks were as much an asset as
her confidence, helping to make her believably uptown or small town, hardened
or vulnerable, cold or libidinal. She was by no means a type. Paul Newman, to
whom she was introduced in the office of a talent agent, looked like something
else entirely, and for her the feeling was distaste at first sight.
As we
discover in “The Last Movie Stars,” HBO’s six-part documentary about the
couple’s long, enviable, thorny life together, the young actor struck her as
someone “kept on ice.” Woodward was ultimately the heat source that enabled the
thaw. The couple fell in love — or rather into a deep well of consuming
attraction — during the Broadway debut of William Inge’s “Picnic” in 1953 where
they served, all too fittingly, as understudies in a play about the
transgressive, liberating qualities of desire. Woodward knew she had found the
man she would marry — even if he already had a wife and three children.
What
happened to Woodward’s brazenness, for better or worse, the resolve and outsize
ambition, is in so many ways the familiar story of modern womanhood, rooted in
agonizing choices too often made by default compromise and vague negotiation
that lay down the rebar for so much regret. The film comes to us from Ethan
Hawke, an actor in middle age, a Brooklyn dad in loose clothing, endearingly
transfixed by his subjects’ humility and endurance — artistic, political,
erotic, psychic, parental. I am not sure that the actor, once the husband of
Uma Thurman and now married to their children’s former nanny (a co-producer of
the film), embarked on this project as a feminist analysis of power coupledom,
but it is where we land in any event, as if there were no alternate route.
In the
fabled world of the Actors Studio in the ’50s, Woodward stood out for her exceptional
gifts of craft and Newman, in an inversion of the standard gender conventions,
for a physical presence that seemed to hold him captive. Like Marilyn Monroe,
he came there to study already beset by insecurities that were then aggravated
in the formidable company of actors — Brando, James Dean, Geraldine Page and
Karl Malden — considered the greatest of their generation.
Woodward’s
career was the first to ascend. Newman was enraptured by his wife’s talent, but
it turned out that she also had an ability for eliciting his. The sexual
persona that seemed integral to him was by his own account his wife’s creation.
Once, Newman came home to their place in Westport, Conn., to find Joanne
refashioning an outbuilding in crazy colors with ad hoc furniture — a place for
them, she told him, to retreat to their carnality. (The film relies on
thousands of pages of transcribed interviews with Newman, his friends, family
members, directors, who are given voice by prominent actors, most of whom, like
Laura Linney and Bobby Cannavale, were incubated in the New York theater.) The
couple’s intimacy deepened Newman, exposing what he wasn’t sure he really
possessed.
Once the
monument of her husband’s iconic image was finally constructed, Woodward fell
into her domestic obligations. There were six children in total — the three
girls the couple had together and the two daughters and a son, who died of a
drug overdose in the late 1970s, that Newman shared with his first wife.
Woodward was by all accounts an excellent mother, so much so that one of her
stepchildren had the name “Joanne Woodward” tattooed on her forearm. Stephanie
Newman, interviewed in the film, worshiped her in spite of the fact that her
own mother was devastated by her father’s betrayal — not only because she had
been left for someone else but because she also had wanted to become an
actress. In 1958, the first Mrs. Newman was left to suffer the affront of her
ex-husband’s very public new marriage and the fact that Woodward, only in her
20s, had received the Academy Award for best actress the same year.
Woodward
was honored for her performance in “The Three Faces of Eve,” a film about
multiple personality disorder whose subtext of maternal dissatisfaction, in
hindsight, would foretell her own ambivalent relationship to family life. A
frustrated housewife, Eve White develops two other identities; inhabiting one
of them, she tries to strangle her daughter with a curtain pull until her
husband stops her. An old interview in the documentary has Woodward confessing
what no mother ever feels permitted to say: that if she had to do it all over
again she is not sure she would have had children at all. The professional
sacrifices had piled up too high.
I watched
the episode of “The Last Movie Stars’’ in which that clip appears on the same
afternoon I read about Serena Williams’s retirement. At 40, an age when we
assume athletes will put away the equipment, one of the greatest tennis players
of all time still felt compelled to explain her decision in the context of how
fulfilling it was to be able to pick up her daughter from school.
Woodward’s
admission is such a revelation not simply for its honesty but for the way it
illuminates our withdrawal from deeply uncomfortable truths about motherhood
toward the pretense and artifice energized by social media. In so many ways,
Woodward refused to cater to expectation. Television clips from her appearances
on talk shows in the ’70s and ’80s show her in high collared blouses, sometimes
affixed with a brooch, her hair neat and prim, explicitly Fairfield County, as
if she were quietly waging war against the notion that a middle-aged woman
would really have to work it to keep the attentions of the hottest man alive.
Asked by Playboy magazine in the late ’60s if he was ever tempted to cheat,
Newman famously responded that he didn’t have to go out for hamburger when he
had steak at home. The analogy enraged Woodward. Her sexuality was her own. In
that way, she really was the last movie star.
Ginia
Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City
columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also
been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
@GiniaNYT
The Last Movie Stars: Ethan Hawke pays a complex
tribute to his idols
In a new docuseries, the actor recounts the tale of
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward with adulation but not without critique
Charles
Bramesco
@intothecrevasse
Mon 25 Jul
2022 07.20 BST
The Last
Movie Stars, a new documentary series on Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
released to HBO Max this past weekend, occasionally allows its focus to drift
to a third subject. Ethan Hawke presides as director and producer on the six episodes,
and he makes no effort to minimize his own presence under some pretense of
fly-on-the-wall objectivity. As much as his extensive research project exists
to chronicle the lives and works of a Hollywood power couple in a league of
their own, he also digests the narrative at hand by examining his own
relationship to it.
With a
cavalcade of famous pals Zoom-ing in during the shaggy-haired early days of
quarantine, a murderers’ row of actors’ actors who also record voiceover
readings of archival documents, Hawke pontificates on how a generation of
serious thespians modeled themselves and their careers after Newman and
Woodward. For a substantive performer looking to cultivate a rich inner life of
varied hobbies and intellectual pursuits to go along with A-list icon status,
there’s no clearer exemplar than Newman, whose ice-blue eyes hid the soul of a
Lee Strasberg student and racecar driver.
Considered
as a whole, this tribute to the pair ’00s tabloid media would’ve dubbed Jaul
(Poanne?) doubles as a case study in fandom practiced properly. The profile of
the typical fan has been significantly warped over the past internet-besotted
decade, now more closely associated with lockstep devotees of pop music or
superhero movies, hordes prone to cyber-swarming anyone who challenges their
absolute allegiance. Hawke trades this unquestioning fealty for an appreciation
with a more critical bent, willing to acknowledge Newman’s sizable flaws
alongside his virtues. For all his open admiration, Hawke constructs an
even-keeled assessment of an essential artist and troubled man. In doing so, he
demonstrates how to account for the problematic aspects of a personal favorite,
a challenge for all of us that grows more pressing with every breaking scandal.
While he’s
sculpted a public image of an alt-heartthrob farther from the movie-star
mainstream than Newman, Hawke has still followed in the elder actor’s path:
from-the-ground-up training in theater, consistently range-expanding screen
roles under a host of esteemed auteurs, side endeavors too dedicated to be
written off as dabbling. As the episodes touch on each canonical Newman
performance, Hawke shares a beat of breathless awe with whoever he’s got on the
line. “Denzel in Malcolm X. De Niro, Raging Bull. Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke!”
Hawke effuses, delivering some variation on this for Hud, The Sting, The Color
of Money, and the rest. But his is a purposeful admiration, his compliments
always couched in a thoughtful analysis of the characters Newman played and how
they corresponded to his life story.
Though
Hawke doesn’t talk around his identification with Newman, he does devote just
as much time and attention to Woodward, and the shifting dynamic between the
longtime spouses. It’s here that Hawke’s circumspect view of a larger-than-life
legend really comes into play, as firsthand sources establish her to be a nobly
suffering support beam to a husband on the verge of collapse. The series
doesn’t gloss over Newman’s functional alcoholism, showing us home movies in
which he sloppily toddles around his living room clutching a bottle. More
unsettling still is a clip in which we see one of his children doing a
convincing cross-eyed impression of Daddy under the influence, a sign of the
negligent parenting for which he’d feel immense guilt later in life. (The death
by overdose of his son, fledgling stuntman Scott, is Newman’s rock bottom.) George
Clooney reads as Newman throughout the series, and infuses real anger into a
rant that sees him defending his choices as a father by claiming that at least
he didn’t beat his kids.
But life is
long, and Newman’s thread continues. The latter episodes chart his redemption
as he scales back his intake of alcohol – “just beer,” he maybe-jokes – and
makes good through charity and outreach to those struggling with addiction.
Hawke takes this without judgement, as he does the rest of Newman’s complicated
journey. “The people I admire the most are the ones who overcome their demons
and work with them, and that’s what I take from it,” Hawke told Business
Insider last week. “If you don’t have shadow, you don’t have light.” He wisely
eschews outright hero-worship for Newman’s greatness or dismissal for his
darkness, instead assuming a nuanced view that accounts for all the frailty of
human nature. Anyone invested in the arts must confront this contradiction
constantly, that the people responsible for work we find beautiful or moving
could nonetheless behave in ugly or cruel ways behind closed doors. The adult
mind can hold two opposing thoughts at the same time, and in Hawke’s case, even
fuse them into a wider comprehension of how a genius’ demons can inform and even
motivate their finest hours. There’s no interest in condemnation nor
exoneration here, a verdict either way being a useless roadblock to
understanding. Newman has passed, his legacy cemented. He simply is, and Hawke
accepts him on those self-evident terms.
The Last
Movie Stars is now available on HBO Max in the US with a UK date to be
announced
Who knew a six-hour documentary about a Hollywood
marriage would be so electrifying?
Emma
Brockes
The Last Movie Stars, about power couple Paul Newman
and Joanne Woodward, also proves a devastating portrait of an era
Thu 28 Jul 2022 14.00 BST
The
synopsis of The Last Movie Stars, HBO’s new six-part documentary about
Hollywood power couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, doesn’t look promising
on paper. Filmed at the height of Covid, it is directed and hosted by Ethan
Hawke and threatens us with a long list of A-list actors appearing via Zoom to
assume various characters. The source material – hundreds of hours of
transcripts from interviews commissioned by Newman for a biography that never
materialised – tells the story not just of the couple and their careers, but of
an era, a marriage and an industry. All of which sounds fine, within its
limitations. But who has the time or appetite for six hours of this stuff?
As it turns
out, watching The Last Movie Stars is an extraordinary experience. As a
documentary, it’s different in form to Peter Jackson’s Get Back, the eight
hours of recut studio footage from the Beatles’ 1969 recording session. The
Last Movie Stars is a more conventional project, with commentary and talking
heads intercut with archive footage from Newman and Woodward’s filmography. And
yet the depth of the material and the sheer boldness of the show’s length
invite a similar sense of immersion to Get Back. Newman burned all the audio
tapes from which the transcripts derive, for reasons that, as the show
progresses, become obvious: the revelations are so intimate, so startling and
at times so devastating, it’s amazing they existed in the first place.
George
Clooney reads for Newman; Laura Linney for Woodward. Interviews with Gore
Vidal, their great friend, are read brilliantly by Brooks Ashmanskas. Zoe Kazan
– whose grandfather, Elia, directed Newman multiple times and features
prominently in the material – reads for Jackie McDonald, Newman’s first wife.
Newman and Woodward were beloved movie stars, but there is something about the
granular level of the dive into their lives that almost renders the celebrity
meaningless. The portrait of a marriage – not just of Newman and Woodward’s,
but of the fallout from Newman’s marriage to McDonald – would, one suspects, be
gripping even without the Hollywood shine.
Of course,
there’s a huge added frisson that comes from stars playing stars. When Newman
discusses the vicissitudes of fame, you know that Clooney, conveying the
actor’s words in his own unmistakable voice, is applying all the insights to
himself. The series also captures an era in which, as Vidal puts it, one saw
“the end of movies as the universal art form”. Upstaged in his early career by
Marlon Brando and James Dean, beautiful but not smouldering, quiet, reticent,
withholding and unsure of himself, Newman nonetheless rose to the level of
icon. Unpicking how this happened, and how Newman – who says, at one point, “I
had a struggle with confidence all my life” – overcame this, is like reading a
very fine novel.
And then
there is the personal stuff. In one interview, Newman says that the first time
he wept as an adult was at the birth of Nell, his first child with Woodward.
The fact that he already had three children with McDonald requires no further
commentary, although the presence in the documentary of Stephanie, one of his
daughters with McDonald, feels, from a production view, like an incredible get.
“They were so hot for each other,” she recalls of her father and stepmother,
before talking about how “disgusted” she was with her dad for how he treated
her mother, and allowing the viewer to understand that the story is much bigger
than that. “Pop was a complicated guy.”
The
portrait of Woodward is even more fascinating. When the couple met, Woodward
was the star; she had just won an Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve. Newman,
meanwhile, could barely land a lead role. Over the years, the balance shifted.
After the couple had children, Woodward found herself spending more and more
time at home with the kids. “Why is Shirley MacLaine getting all those parts?”
she says bitterly at one point, before making the admission, “If I had to do it
all again, I might not have had children.” Hawke, with the sensitivity of a
movie star who has been married to another movie star, says sagely: “Many of us
lose our dreams. But most of us don’t have a partner who has the exact same
dreams, and his come true.”
The effect
of all this – the accumulation of detail, the stunning visuals, the startling
honesty of the transcripts, in which, at one stage, Newman says with rare
insight for the time: “Being born white in America in 1925; that’s the
beginning of the luck” – makes The Last Movie Stars one of the best TV
programmes of the year so far. (No date is yet set for its broadcast in the
UK.) Hawke, dishevelled while trying to find decent wifi in his house, marshals
his famous pals in what, in less able hands, might have been a piece of
self-indulgence. As it is, these six hours about art, and love, and ambition,
and disappointment are utterly electrifying.
Emma
Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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