THE NEWMANS: A FILM FAMILY

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33037, 3 October 1972, Page 7

THE NEWMANS: A FILM FAMILY

(Printed by arrangement with the Christian Science Monitor) (By

LOUISE SWEENEY)

NEW YORK. The door is ajar, framing a shot of Joanne Woodward in a tacky maroon bathrobe. She is listening to her husband and director, the man with the familiar back of the head—the gray, curly hair, closely cropped like a Greek statue’s.

Paul Newman is talking softly to his wife, his head cocked on one side. She listens, her hand on her hip, then closes her eyes, says, “Yeah,” and winces. “I hate to say that,” she tells him. She fusses with the safety pin on her robe. He thinks. “Then cut it,” he says quietly. “Cut it out.” They begin the scene again and the door closes as a technician says, “This is a rehearsal, right?” When it opens again we see that the set couldn’t be any tighter unless the film were shot in an elevator. There is a tiny, drab tan room that could only be called a parlour, hung with sad pseudo-lace curtains and festooned with messes—papers, littered ashtrays, remembrances of meals past. In one window sits a tray full of the bright orange flowers that title the film: “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.” We see the girl who grows them for a science class experiment in the story, a rather Alice-in-Wonderland girl with long blonde hair and a white rabbit in her arms. She stands with her back to her film mother, Miss Woodward. The girl is Nell Potts, the Newmans’ 13-year-old daughter, who’s chosen a childhood nickname for her first screen credit rather than Nell Newman.

Her father says of Nell: “It’s easy to direct her. Her own quality carries. Her quality not as a performer, but as a person, carriers her through. Put her face on camera and let her twitch away and you’ve got a scene.” RIVETING SIGHT Paul Newman, superstar, is a riveting sight on the set. He is flushed with sunburn so that the flamethrower blue eyes blaze in his face—-the eyes look as though they could bum holes in whatever he focuses on. He is wearing a tan poplin jump suit with Cossack embroidery at the neck and ankles; it looks like a tunic that kept on going. A viewfinder hangs like a stethoscope from his neck. On his feet are Dayglo orange socks and mocassins. He is handsome, but he is not playing Hud or Butch Cassidy, he is not projecting the high-intensity dazzle that’s made him a box office smash. He’s just being a director. And even giving a kind of Better Homes and Gardens tour of his set. The film is

being shot on location in Bridgeport, Connecticut (17 minutes away from the Newmans’ home). Interiors are being done in the abandoned parsonage of a deconsecrated Hungarian church marked for urban renewal. We climb the rickety stairs to a bedroom. “We had everything dimmed up,” says Mr Newman with a proprietary smile. “See the aging of the wallpaper—it’s heavier at the light switch."

The house is a downer, expertly done in terms of the Alvin Sargent script taken from Paul Zindel’s play about an anguished loser, a frayed widow who lashes out at her two daughters and life in general with as much black humour as savagery. “The house has Joanne in a depressed state,” says her husband. The role is also a tough and exhausting one, which gives her no time for small talk. After a final take she rushes to a more cheerful atmosphere, her red, white, and blue striped dressing room built into a corner of the church adjacent to the parsonage. CONVERTED CHURCH

The church has been converted into production headquarters; we see props, wardrobe, a woman whizzing away at a sewing machine, a flashing red police light to signal takes, several tables set up with checked cloths for lunch under the vaulted ceilings where painted angels hover.

Outside on the steps of the tan brick and wood church, the crew suns itself during breaks. On the steps more cartons of marigolds languish, and in the yard sit the green bar bells Mr Newman works out on daily. A Skandia smorgasbord truck full of lunch idles nearby. After a dozen difficult takes of one scene, “Marigolds” breaks for lunch. Mr Newman sits down with his steak, catsup, orange sections and pickles to talk shop. “The script is the single most important factor under consideration. I did have certain script restrictions as a director. I’m not interested so much in concepts or messages or anything like that. I’m interested in creating emotions, and this script does that quite successfully, though it’s an extremely difficult part for Joanne. It’s stretching for an entirely different kind of performance.” Did she mind the stretching?

“She does to this very day,” he says with his mil-lion-dollar grin. CHANGE OF IMAGE

Miss Woodward is struggling gamely with a role that is obviously countercasting. She’s discarded her glamorous blonde image to frump around in a slum of a robe, wearing white nylon bobby socks, green corduroy slippers, playing a role about a

fading woman who never bloomed, a part laced with bitter self-satire. Her haid, drabbed to an ashy mouse colour, looks as it it had been styled with a blender. She wears no visible makeup and is self-conscious about her appearance, even though the lovely bones and catgreen eyes haven’t changed She seems unaware that the beauty is still there, even without the props. We talk about the easy almost family feeling on this small set, where most of the crew has worked with the Newmans before. “The only one who’s uptight sometimes is Joanne,” says Mr Newman. “She thinks she’s not funny enough or sad enough and that some of the scenes elude her. But she’s got a lot of guts. She doesn’t just sit back and let the character come to her.”

Has the dual relationship of husband-director and wifeactress caused any problems? “No,” he says. “I don’t think it makes any difference. I respect her talent and work. We work very much in the same way. If there’s any reaction it’s at the other end of the spectrum, at home. It’s really all highs or all lows, no middle ground.” He drops a pickle at the next question and says, "Someone put you up to that! No? Well, yes, I would love for Joanne to direct me in a picture, but she’s not interested in directing.” EARLY SUCCESS Mr Newman was named best director of the year by the New York film critics his first time out. That was for “Rachel, Rachel,” which starred Miss Woodward, and he says that he directed it only because "everyone turned it down, no one wanted to do it. (It wasn’t until his name was added as director that the film got backing money.) Everyone thought the theme was too tiny. But loneliness is a universal emotion, people identified with it, with the character (of Rachel). It was the truth about the struggles people go through to change.” Was he pleased about winning the best-director’s award? “Oh, yes, and I hated myself for it. The high lasted two days, and a terrible depression set in when I realised how the award had gotten to me.” That man is also the author of the lines: “Audiences being whatever they are and critics being uncertain and whimsical, the only thing to do is just to make pictures and in the end if it fails, that’s not really the important thing; you’ve made the movie.”

Mr Newman is nipping back and forth between acting and directing—the second film he directed was “Sometimes a Great Notion,” starring Henry Fonda, Lee Remick, and himself. He became director after an accident on the set

! resulted in the original direc- ■ tor’s resignation and the star was asked to take over. But he’s on record as saying it [ wsn’t a property he would , have chosen himself, like . "Marigolds,” his third film. ' 33 FILMS I As an actor, he’s already . made 33 films and has a new ; one coming up: "The Life and ; Times of Judge Roy Bean.” ■ “In order to survive in : motion pictures I have to ■ wear a couple of hats," he j says. “The roles available to , me as an actor now are fewer t nd fewer. But I was a direct- > ing major at Yale, you know, > not an acting major. I didn’t i intend to act. I stumble into i whatever I do, . . . With i ‘Rachel’ I got pushed into directing.” When Mr Newman "stumi bled” into acting with his first I film, “The Silver Chalice” in i 1954, the image of the Hollyi wood actor was already i changing fast. “Back when : the Academy Awards started,” he notes, "the actors ! in this country were royalty. : The rock groups are probably • closer to our royalty now. It > has something to do with i adulation. J “During the Second World I War it wasn’t fashionable to ’ be a star any more, you had > to be the guy next door, not live high off the hog and

drive a Duesenberg.” Would he have enjoyed being a Hollywood star back in those days? This man who relishes his family privacy (no interviews with Nell) laughs and mutters something about “lobbing hand grenades at the tourists.”

In spite of the privacy thing, there have been questions about his interest in politics. He has campaigned actively for Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, Representative Paul N. McCloskey Jun., and now Senator George McGovern.

Does he want to run for office? "Impossible to do it,” he says. "Campaigning is intolerable medieval torture. And for presidential candidates, in addition to being dangerous, it’s humilating. He told another interviewer, “I don’t have the arrogance and I don’t have the credentials.”

Arrogance is a dirty word to Paul Newman, one he uses frequently in interviewing. I asked him why. There was one of his long silences, during which he might have been either pausing for a semicolon or ending the interview.

“To be able to use power with grace is an enviable trait,” he said finally. And perhaps the secret of awardwinning direction.