Paul Newman The Man Behind the Baby Blues Page 2

  "Whatever you do, don't tell the world you've got Jewish blood," she warned her son. "Most of the world hates Jews. Your real name is spelled NE-U-MAN. But I got your father to change it to Newman."

  Paul did not take her advice. When he first arrived in Hollywood, he let his associates know he was Jewish. "It's nothing to be ashamed of," he told friends. "I'm proud of my heritage." Of course, he did not take out ads in newspapers, and many of his co-workers never knew he was Jewish. In fact, when Otto Preminger cast Paul in Exodus, several news accounts noted that the director had hired a "non-Jewish actor" for the role.

  "I like the name of NEW MAN," Theresa told Paul. "It's poetic and symbolic of your bright future in America. My secret nickname for you is going to be `Numie.' It'll be just something we use in private. Our little secret. You can share all your secret desires with me. Never your father. He doesn't understand you have the sensitive soul of a poet. Men like him are concerned only with commerce. They treat their sons and especially their wives with brutality. I have to endure sex with him. It feels like a knife stabbing me in the gut. The only good that ever came out of sex was God's gift of you."

  Theresa had a lot of spare time because her husband hired a combination maid and cook. Often she'd take a bus to downtown Cleveland and the Hannah Theatre where she attended matinees. She was reluctant to admit it, but Sarah Cohn claimed that Theresa wanted to be an actress herself. "She read all the fan magazines-Greta Garbo was her favorite," Sarah said. "She dreamed dreams that could never be."

  Whenever Theresa returned from a stage production in Cleveland, she described in minute detail every scene to her young son. Amazingly, for reasons not known, she did not invite him to go with her to the theater.

  When his mother wasn't attending the theater, she prepared elaborate Hungarian specialties for her family. "She made the world's greatest goulash," Paul later claimed. "It was dear old mom who gave me my love of food. She even taught me how to cook. I learned all her secret recipes, some of which I would one day publish in a book."

  "Dad took me on fishing trips," Paul said. "He encouraged me to go out for sports in spite of my small size. He taught me to swim. One time when he caught me cooking with mom, he shouted at her. `You're raising a son, not a god damn girl! Get that fucking apron off that kid. A kitchen is no place for a boy."'

  "But the world's greatest chefs were and are men," she protested.

  "She also wanted me to be a musician," Paul said. "I took piano lessons. I failed. I tried the violin. I failed, never becoming a virtuoso like Jack Benny." As he said that, Paul flashed his famous grin to suggest he was joking.

  "In the early years I told each of my parents what they wanted to hear," Paul said. "Dad learned that I wanted to grow up to be a baseball player. Mother believed that I wanted to go on the stage, even though I had not committed to acting."

  Encouraged by Theresa to join The Curtain Raisers, a children's theater, Paul made his stage debut at the age of seven, playing a court jester in The Travails of Robin Hood. In that play, he yodeled a song composed by his uncle, Joseph Newman. His father's brother was a journalist and poet. "He was the artist in the family-not me," said Arthur Senior. Joseph, like Theresa, felt that a kid with Paul's stunning looks belonged on the stage.

  By the age of twelve, Paul was playing Saint George in St. George and the Dragon. The dragon was actually a placid old bulldog, and Paul's job was to pour salt on its tail and vanquish him. "My legs were shaking on opening night," Paul later said. "They've been shaking on opening night ever since. I'll let you in on a secret. These skinny legs never shook more than when I had to go out and face the critics as the curtain went up on Sweet Bird of Youth."

  After witnessing his performance as Saint George, Theresa told her son, "You have such beauty. Too bad it has to be wasted on a boy."

  Years later he confided a secret to his mother after he returned from his first job in Hollywood. "Believe you me, that beauty has not been wasted."

  Paul recalled that "it was Uncle Joe who defined the rewards awaiting a young man who devoted himself to the artistic life. He became my surrogate father."

  When Paul was only sixteen, Uncle Joe had told him, "Your mind is a flame to be kindled."

  There is a certain irony in the fact that the man who would grow up to become a sex symbol around the world did not early in life fill out the potential of his frame.

  When he attended local elementary schools, he was frequently beaten up by older bullies. Since most of these boys were not too familiar with homosexuality, they referred to Paul as a sissy. One day after school a group of six bullies attacked him and hauled him off into the bushes. There Paul was restrained while one of the boys pulled down his pants. One of the boys later claimed, "We wanted to see if pretty boy was really a boy. All of us had to look at his jewels just to make sure."

  At Shaker Heights High School, Paul wanted to be a football player but didn't have the build for it. I did get offered the job of a male cheerleader, though. I also wanted to play baseball. But I was no good at that either. The coach told me I pitched like a girl."

  "I worked in some school plays as an actor and stage manager," Paul recalled, "but I had no real interest in becoming an actor. Early in life I learned a bitter lesson about the theater. An actor doesn't always get the role he wants. In a school production, I tried to get the role of first grave-digger in Hamlet. It went to another guy."

  When he told his mother of his loss, she comforted him. "Forget about playing a grave-digger. That's not for you. My dream is to live long enough to see my son starring in Hamlet on Broadway."

  "My father just assumed I was going to join him in the sporting goods business," Paul said. "I worked there after school and on Saturdays. He paid me less than he did his other employees. But he promised both Junior and me that one day he'd give us the family business. I wasn't looking forward to selling footballs and baseball mitts for the rest of my life."

  In his final years of high school, Paul's height shot up four inches. His exact height would remain a lifelong debate. His most generous appraisers claim that at his peak he stood five feet, ten and a half inches tall. His critics countered that he "towered" no more than five feet, six inches.

  In 1986 Paul's height, or lack thereof, became a nationwide debate. The New York Post launched a campaign that promised to pay $1,000 in charity donations for every proven inch the actor measured over five feet, eight inches.

  Appearing on the TV program, Live at Five, Paul responded to The Post in anger. "For a newspaper that makes ten million a year, a thousand dollar bet is chicken feed. I'll write a check to The New York Post for a half-million dollars. If they're wrong, though, then it's time to start playing hardball. Let's not make it one thousand dollars an inch. Make it one hundred thousand an inch, or one hundred twenty-five thousand a quarter-inch for anything above five feet, eight inches." The Post backed down and refused to take Paul up on his offer.

  Like his future friend, Tom Cruise, Paul was extremely sensitive about his height, claiming he stood five feet, eleven inches. Many co-workers in the film industry doubted that. One in particular, Sandi Burton, posed with him for promotional pictures for A New Kind of Love. She claimed that she measured five feet nine inches, and "I remembered looking down at him."

  The London Mail hired a policewoman, the city's expert on body height. She used an elaborate trigonometric formula on a photograph of him walking down Piccadilly in London. The Mail announced her scientific conclusion. "Paul Newman measures exactly five feet, seven inches tall."

  When Paul shot up in height, he also began to fill out, becoming more muscular, although his well-defined body would always be taut, not massively developed like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  "There was no contest," Mary Schribner, a classmate said. "Paul Newman was the best good-looking guy in school. He wasn't just handsome but strikingly good looking, the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen. But girls didn't want to date him. He was always pulling pranks on girls, always up to some mischief. He once put a dead snake in a girl's lunchbox. He was a cut-up, the class clown. He liked to play gags. He sat right behind me in class and was always

  annoying me. Once when I sat down, it sounded like I'd let out a big fart. He'd put some rubber contraption under my seat. The whole class laughed at me. I felt so embarrassed I cried. What girl in her right mind would want to date Mr. Tomfoolery?"

  Eventually, the school bullies stopped calling him a sissy and began wanting to hang out with him, especially one friend named Ralph Sage. His wild nights out with the boys led to a serious accident in 1940. Paul had borrowed his father's car to go on a joyride with his friend Ralph. Losing control of the wheel, Paul crashed the vehicle into a big oak tree, almost totaling it.

  Miraculously both he and Ralph escaped with only minor injuries. As punishment for this, for a full eleven months every day after school ended, Paul was confined to the house unless he was otherwise needed to help out in the sporting goods store.

  Paul might not have been popular with the girls at his high school, but as he grew into manhood he attracted attention from one of his neighbors-let's call her Jane Doe. She'd first met Paul when he had a paper route along Brighton Road and had watched him grow up. Back when he was nine years old, she used to invite him inside her home for freshly baked cookies.

  Jane's husband had died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the neighbors reported that she was the loneliest, saddest woman in Shaker Heights. Even after Paul gave up the paper route and went to work for his father, he still saw Jane on occasion.

  Following the car accident, when his father refused to let him drive the family car, Paul secretly borrowed Jane's car "whenever I needed wheels," as he later admitted. Arthur Senior had no knowledg
e of this. The car had belonged to Jane's sailor husband, and she almost never used it.

  Details are lacking, and Paul told only a few close friends, including one Chris Chase, but at some point in their relationship, Jane attempted to seduce the handsome sixteen-year-old. From all reports, the sexual encounter was a disaster, and Paul had been too nervous to perform adequately with the older woman. That ended their years-long friendship, and Paul avoided her house from then on and was no longer seen driving her car.

  The experience may have turned him off girls, and especially older women, for years. While appearing on Broadway in William Inge's Picnic, he confessed to the playwright that, "It took me years to decide which direction I wanted to go in. I was very confused at the time, and I let a lot of people, especially in the Navy, take advantage of me. Even back then, I knew one thing, and that was I did not want to live the life of a homosexual. It was too limiting, too degrading. I wanted to spend my life making love to beautiful women, but I just didn't know how to go about it. A lot of boys my age were getting girls pregnant without meaning to-and being forced to marry them. I didn't want to be forced into anything like that. I was also a growing boy with needs, and those needs were very sexual. My hand came into intimate contact with a certain part of my body night after night. But I wanted more."

  Part of Paul Newman's legend is that he was a "romantic loner" while growing up in Ohio. He always appeared to be dreaming "the impossible dream," Arthur Senior said. His mother had the opposite point of view. "He will do great things, accomplish much. He can do whatever he sets his mind to do, only he's not sure what that is yet."

  When he was just thirteen, Paul began his long, rambling walks around Greater Cleveland, discov ering hidden beauty spots. He was also attracted to tawdry scenes, and was fascinated to see female prostitutes soliciting their trade in the seedy parts of Cleveland. Once he walked for miles, just following the railroad tracks, as if that would lead him out of the Cleveland area and into a new life. He explained to Theresa that, "I need time to think, to get away, be myself, and figure things out." He never explained exactly what he was figuring out.

  His distant relative, Sarah Cohn, had always observed the young boy closely, and she was filled with opinions. "Behind those blue eyes was a bubbling cauldron," she said. "Paul never invited anyone, not even his mother, to look inside his head. There were things going on there that we could not even conceive. Those penetrating eyes of his only told you that something was going on, but you didn't know what. I suspected that he was dangerous. I knew he'd started drinking beer, and a lot of it, when he was only fifteen. He managed to conceal this from his father, but Theresa found out. She forgave him. He could have been exposed as a serial killer, and that woman would have pardoned him his sin. If anyone knew what was going on with Paul, it was Chris Chase, who became his buddy. I think he attended another school. For a time, Paul and Chris became inseparable."

  Every high school in the country had a hunky stud like Chris Chase. Many girls avoided him out of fear, but others clustered around him. The guys sought him out too. Blond and blue-eyed, he was handsome in a menacing sort of way.

  Although he was only seventeen, he looked much older. He was the most physically developed of all his classmates, with on most occasions a day's growth of beard, when the other boys needed only one shave a month, if that. His chest hair was always visible above the neckline of a white T-shirt.

  The circumstances of how he met Paul, who was enrolled in another school, aren't known. But soon they were going everywhere together, attending football games and going for long rides in the Ohio countryside in Chris's hot rod.

  Paul may have been honored that such a soughtafter student wanted to spend time with him instead of joining in the more usual pursuit of available girls.

  "There was a chemistry there," said Betty Cally, who attended school with Chris. "I saw them having an ice cream soda one afternoon, and though they were the center of attention, these guys didn't even know anyone else existed. When they met each other, Chris stopped dating girls and Paul gave up that rough gang of guys he used to pal around with. In those days, it wasn't unusual for a boy to spend more time with his best pal than he did with his girlfriend. Boyfriends were an everyday affair. Being with your girl was a special occasion-dressing up for a date to the movies, or on rare occasions a visit to a cheap restaurant, perhaps attending some school event together."

  Chris was also a guitar-picking singer of limited talent. He was a dimestore Elvis Presley long before that singer swept the nation. Thanks partly to Chris' good looks and dynamic sex appeal, he got a few weekend bookings at bars and nightclubs in downtown Cleveland.

  Paul was given permission to spend a weekend in the city with Chris. The lie told was that they were going to stay at the house of Chris's uncle. In fact, Chris had booked them into a seedy hotel a block from The Blue Note, where he was appearing as a singer. Chris, who looked far older than his actual years, had presented a fake ID when he was hired. Chris then persuaded the club's manager to allow (the underaged) Paul into the club as well.

  The night Chris took him out was Paul's first exposure to a night club. He didn't know what to expect. Chris told him to stand at the bar where he'd cleared it with the bartender that Paul was allowed to order beer. Excusing himself, Chris went backstage to change into his costume for the night.

  As Paul waited for Chris to go on, he found himself the center of attention from a lot of older men, one of whom asked him, "Are you skipping your boy scout meeting tonight?" Paul was too terrified to speak and tried to ignore the men's lewd propositions. As he scanned the bar, he could not see one woman in attendance.

  When the beer consumption led to the inevitable, a tipsy Paul headed back to the men's room. Chris still hadn't made an appearance. On the way to the toilet, Paul was groped two or three times. He struck at the hands that felt him up.

  Standing at the urinal in the men's room, he found it impossible to urinate with so many eyes fastened on his crotch. He slipped into a private stall and locked the door. By the time he emerged from the toilet, Chris was on the stage. Paul was shocked at his appearance.

  Chris was the original Naked Cowboy, pre-dating the famous iconic image in Times Square. With his guitar strapped on, he wore only white boots and a tight-fitting and very revealing bikini. Paul didn't think he was much of a singer, but he enthralled the audience. His signature song was "You Are My Sunshine."

  At the end of his act, which met with roaring applause, Chris removed his ten-gallon hat and passed it around the audience. The men filled it with dollar bills.

  A waiter came and ushered Paul backstage to Chris' dressing room, where he was changing into street clothes. He ordered Paul to count the money in his hat. As Chris dressed, Paul counted out one-hundred and eleven dollars. He'd never held that much money in his life.

  "Let's get some grub," Chris told him. "After that, I'll rent us a hot whore for ten bucks. We'll enjoy her together."

  Two hours later Paul found himself in bed naked with an equally naked Chris and a much older hooker who seemed bored with the two young boys. Chris went first, as Paul watched in fascination. When it came time for his turn, he was reluctant to mount the prostitute but was urged on by Chris.

  "I began to rub my hands over Paul's body until it produced the desired effect," Chris later claimed. "He finally did the job. I really believe if I hadn't been rubbing and fondling him, he'd never have gone through with it."

  Chris also claimed that a month later, when Paul obtained permission from his parents for another nocturnal excursion to downtown Cleveland, he seduced Paul. "I figured if he'd let me feel him up, he wouldn't resist my next moves. This time no whore. I had him all weekend in that flea trap. I taught the kid everything he knows about man-on-man sex. He took to it like a pig in shit. He was a natural. He ended up doing everything I wanted, and I'm a God damn demanding guy in bed."

  Paul's affair with Chris did not last long. There was a scandal that was whispered about in Shaker Heights. It seemed that Chris, for pay, had gotten sexually involved with one of his high school teachers, who had taken pornographic pictures of him. Somehow this became known to the police who moved in. The scandal was hushed up but the teacher was fired and disappeared from town.