In the Company of Legends

by Joan Kramer

  She mentioned that she’d just come back from having her driver’s license renewed that afternoon, and laughed as she said, “I was whisked to the front of the line. It sometimes pays to be a movie queen.”

  That was the first of our many teas and lunches there. And it was also our first taste of Norah’s delicious brownies and lace cookies, with Hepburn’s favorite ice cream, Sedutto’s mocha chip.

  And while we never watched the program with her, we were told by her friends that she had indeed seen it. And she inadvertently confirmed it when she said, “George Cukor looked relaxed and much younger in the interview. He must have really liked the two of you.” However, in the years that followed, she claimed that she hadn’t ever seen the show herself.

  “But my spies saw it and told me how good it was.”

  When it was nominated for an Emmy, she said, “It deserves to be nominated, and it should win.” It didn’t, but knowing she was pleased was enough.

  Most importantly—and we didn’t realize it at the time—by producing Starring Katharine Hepburn, we’d passed the obstacle course through which she puts people before deciding whether or not to trust them.

  And if we still needed proof, we called her the day after we went to a performance of The West Side Waltz.

  “Why didn’t you come backstage?” she asked.

  “It was late and we didn’t want to bother you.”

  “You two never bother me,” she said.

  1980. Authors’ collection.

  Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman during interview for 20/20.

  Beverly Hills, CA, 1984. Authors’ collection.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Joanne, Paul, and Hugh

  JK By 1983, I’d known Joanne Woodward for ten years and we’d become good friends. Not long after David and I started working together, that friendship extended to him, too. At WNET, we’d completed programs about Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn, which had aired to considerable success. We had proposed profiles of Henry Fonda and Cary Grant, each of whom had agreed to cooperate. To our amazement, PBS had turned down both of them. Now we were thinking about who and when our “next” could be.

  Joanne and her husband, Paul Newman, had already made nine films together and were about to make their tenth. It was Harry and Son, based on the novel, A Lost King, by Raymond DeCapite. Paul would play the lead, with Joanne as his co-star. He would also direct, and co-produce, and had co-written the script with Ronald Buck. It was to be filmed in and around Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

  DH Our boss, George Page, told us he could find a small amount of seed money for us to go to Florida to shoot footage of the Newmans at work, assuming they would agree. After that we would have to secure a commitment from PBS to do a complete profile of them.

  JK Once we knew we had the funds, I called Joanne and asked to meet with her and Paul. At the time, they were living temporarily at the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue in New York while the apartment they’d just bought was being renovated.

  My timing couldn’t have been worse. Their dog had died the day before at their home in Connecticut, having fallen into the river that ran through their property. (Soon after, they installed an invisible perimeter that prevented any accidents of this sort from happening again; their dogs now wore collars with built-in sensors that stopped them from going beyond the boundary.)

  Joanne told me that she and Paul were both still very upset, but agreed to meet us for tea in the hotel’s coffee shop. When we arrived at about 4 pm, she came down wearing dark glasses; Paul joined us a few minutes later, also wearing sunglasses.

  We reminded them that she had narrated our first two shows on Fred Astaire, and I remember Paul saying, “Yes, and they were terrific.”

  I said, “Now we’re being asked to produce another profile and we’d love it to be about the two of you. If we start right away, it should be possible to have it air around the premiere of your new film.”

  Without further argument, they said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  DH A few weeks later, we were on our way to Ft. Lauderdale. Their assistant, Marcia Franklin, booked us into the Marina Bay Resort, where the cast and the crew were staying. It was a beautiful and unusual complex consisting of houseboats in a sheltered harbor. Joan was worried that she’d be seasick, since the boats undulated with the movement of the water, but her stomach and brain adapted, and she was fine.

  We were able to capture scenes of Paul directing, as well as interview the Newmans’ daughter, Nell, who was visiting the set.

  JK and DH Meanwhile, there had been some changes in Washington. Unbeknown to us, our ally at PBS, Ron Devillier, who had given the green light to both the Astaire and Hepburn projects, had moved on, and his replacement was not as confident in us as Ron had been—or maybe wanted to make his own mark. For whatever the reason, we were not getting the go-ahead we needed, and an opportunity was slipping away.

  Paul on location for Harry and Son.

  Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 1983. Authors’ collection.

  Since we had virtually made a concrete promise to Joanne and Paul that our show would air at a time to help promote their film, we felt an obligation to do our best to make that happen. We recalled that ABC’s weekly prime time news magazine, 20/20, had recently devoted an entire program to a profile of Barbra Streisand. It had generated a great deal of publicity and a huge audience. We decided to find out whether they would do it again if we offered them the Newmans.

  JK I made a cold call to 20/20 and was connected to the program’s executive producer, Av Westin. As luck would have it, he had seen—and enjoyed—our Fred Astaire shows and asked us to come to the ABC offices, just a few blocks away, to meet him. He had decided before we got there that he wanted the project, but explained that he couldn’t give us the entire hour because after the Streisand piece, some critics accused 20/20, which fell under the ABC News umbrella, of abandoning important national and international stories so that it would get higher ratings with a big name entertainer. Therefore, he’d like the Newman/Woodward profile to comprise two-thirds of the show, which would be thirty-three minutes. We were a bit disappointed, but accepted his offer, and then it was just a matter of working out a start date.

  JK and DH Now we had to tell Joanne and Paul that we had set up the project at ABC for 20/20, which would provide a much larger audience, and therefore, more publicity for their film than PBS could. Fortunately, they were enthusiastic; their only condition was that, of the two 20/20 hosts, Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters, Hugh be the correspondent for their piece. WNET gave us a three-month leave-of-absence to work at ABC, and a deal was struck for 20/20 to buy the footage we’d already shot in Florida.

  We were assigned to one of the show’s senior producers, Karen Lerner, and an ace associate producer, Rosanne Zoccoli, who could guide us through the 20/20 machine.

  JK The first snag came when the Newmans’ press agent, Warren Cowan, learned that they had agreed to a profile without us going through him. He called me and said, “I’m going to do everything I can to stop this project.” I remember saying, “Warren, you know that Joanne and Paul are friends of ours, so we called them directly.” That just made him even more furious and he repeated the threat. I spoke with Joanne, who was surprised that Warren’s ego was getting in the way. After all, our piece would make his job as their publicist easier. She said, “Don’t worry. We’ll deal with him.”

  DH Time was of the essence. We were producing a portrait of two stars, each with a very large body of work1. We had to watch almost all of their films, find some of the television programs in which they’d appeared early in their careers, and cull all of it down to thirty-three minutes. That’s a long time by news standards. But for us, it presented a real challenge: doing justice to the Newmans without using such short clips that the audience would never have the chance to appreciate any of them.

  The solution was “less is more.” We’d have to choose sparingly, both in the number of clips and in the number of people we’d
interview.

  Locating feature films isn’t hard. But finding television shows from the 1950s is a tedious, time-consuming job that’s similar to looking for the lost treasures of the Incas. Back when Joanne and Paul started their careers, most of their work was in live television dramas, which aired in prime time on the East Coast. But on the West Coast, with the three-hour difference in time, those shows would either have had to be seen at 5 or 6 pm, or else the networks had to come up with a way to copy the live shows, in order to play them during prime time on the West Coast. Thus the kinescope, a relatively crude way of recording live broadcasts by pointing a film camera at a television monitor. The quality was not great, but kinescopes were certainly better than nothing. And once they served their intended purpose, most of them were then destroyed or thrown into a dumpster, since no one thought they would ever be of any future value. Fortunately for us, some were saved, or salvaged, by producers, directors, stars, or crew members. Now these kines are considered collectors’ items, with archives all over the world actively trying to find and preserve them.

  JK Joanne suggested that we look for a program she’d done in 1953. It was called A Young Lady of Property, written by Horton Foote. And she also asked us to find one of Paul’s best performances—as a punch-drunk fighter in a live television show called The Battler, directed by Arthur Penn.

  I called everyone I could think of to search for those two programs. The original broadcast networks didn’t have them. Arthur Penn said, “I’ve been trying to get a copy of The Battler for years, and so has Paul.” Horton Foote hadn’t seen A Young Lady of Property since it was first shown, but during our conversation he mentioned that his agent, Lucy Kroll, was “a real pack rat” with a good memory. I telephoned her on a Friday afternoon. She called me back on Monday morning.

  “You completely blew my weekend. I spent the whole time digging in my closet. And I found it! It’s a kinescope in an old dented can, so I can’t open it.”

  I said, “Lucy, first, let me tell you how impressed I am that you have a closet big enough in which to spend a weekend. Second, let’s get that kine transferred to tape immediately.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But I’m not letting it out of my hands. I’ll bring it wherever you tell me and you can use it if you make cassettes for me and Horton.”

  “Done deal,” I replied.

  That same afternoon, I was talking to Joanne, whom I’d asked to see whether she could find film of her wedding. She had good news.

  “I found the footage in the barn yesterday. It was in a stack of films in the projection room.” (The Newmans’ guest house was formerly a barn, and is outfitted with a screening room which has professional 35 and 16 millimeter projection equipment.)

  I said, “Joanne, will you please go to the barn and I’ll call you there in a few minutes? I want to know what else is in that stack of films.”

  Five minutes later I could hear the sound of cans being moved around. “I’m looking at all the labels,” she told me. And then after a few seconds, “Oh, look at this. I think I just found The Battler.”

  I tried to stay calm. “Joanne, how long has that can been in the barn?”

  “I have no idea. Probably many years. I didn’t even know we had it. Wait until I tell Paul. He’s not going to believe it.”

  “Tell him to join the group. I’ve just spent weeks talking to dozens of people, including Arthur Penn, trying to find it. It’s going to be a race to see which one of us strangles you first. Don’t open the can. We have to get that kine transferred right away. We’ll make you a cassette of it along with the one I promised Arthur Penn. And by the way, Horton Foote’s agent, Lucy Kroll, found A Young Lady of Property in her closet over the weekend. This is turning out to be a very good day.”

  DH We were able to track down several more kinescopes of Joanne’s and Paul’s early television careers, including episodes of Tales of Tomorrow, Playhouse 90, Goodyear Playhouse, The Alcoa Hour and GE Theater. And in order to speed up the process of getting clips from their feature films, we asked them to sign a letter saying that we were producing an authorized biography of them, in which they were fully co-operating, and requesting that the studios make available excerpts from their films.

  In the meantime, we had decided to interview only four key people: directors George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, and Sidney Lumet, and the Newmans’ long time friend, Gore Vidal, who was also the godfather of their eldest daughter, Nell. (As he said to them, “Always the godfather, never the God.”)

  Gore was the only one who spoke about the Paul/Joanne marriage. “It works so well because they have nothing in common,” he said, with a touch of hyperbole. “She likes ballet; he likes racing. They don’t get in each other’s way.”

  We asked Arthur Penn to come to our office and watch clips from several of the kinescopes to analyze Joanne’s and Paul’s early performances. Much of what he told us was worked into our final script. For example, he pointed out that Joanne showed a relaxed assurance from the beginning of her career. But Paul didn’t until he did a television program called Guilty Is the Stranger. Penn told us, “He’s allowing his emotions to carry him, and we can see the actor developing right before our eyes.”

  JK The Newmans had to be in Los Angeles, where Joanne was making a movie for television. And the only day available for us to film an interview with them turned out to be Super Bowl Sunday. By then, their publicist, Warren Cowan, had calmed down and accepted that this profile was indeed going forward. He suggested we shoot at the home of his ex-wife, Barbara Rush, with whom he still had a very good relationship. He ordered flowers for the room where we’d be filming—and for every other room in the house, too; then he sent us the bill. I had to tell him that our budget couldn’t cope with the hundreds of dollars of floral displays, and in the end we paid only a portion of the total amount.

  Two days before the shoot, we heard that Paul’s lawyer wanted to sit in on it, as did his agent, Michael Ovitz—an audience with the potential for causing trouble, even if only to justify their presence. I told Joanne’s and Paul’s assistant, Marcia, that David and I didn’t want any spectators.

  She called me back and said, “Don’t worry. No one will be there. I told them both not to come.” We didn’t particularly want Warren Cowan there either, but since we were using his ex-wife’s house, we couldn’t bring ourselves to ask him to leave. Fortunately, he and Barbara had plans to watch the Super Bowl at a friend’s house, so soon after we arrived, they disappeared.

  DH The original plan was for Hugh Downs to talk with Joanne first, then Paul, and then both of them together. But Paul also wanted to watch the game, so he said to Joanne, “Darling, what would happen if I went first?” Without missing a beat, she replied, “Darling, I would mourn you.” It was just banter at the time, but now that Paul has died, it takes on a completely different meaning. He also placed a quarter bet with each of the crew members on who would win the game. He lost—and he paid up.

  Paul and Hugh Downs.

  Beverly Hills, CA, 1984. Authors’ collection.

  Joan and Joanne.

  Beverly Hills, CA, 1984. Authors’ collection.

  Rosanne had filled the refrigerator with cans of Budweiser, so that Paul could help himself, which he did. He and Joanne had brought their small dog, Harry (named after the film they’d just completed, Harry and Son), and Paul was teaching it to jump higher and higher, saying, “He thinks he’s Baryshnikov.”

  JK and DH So by the time the camera rolled, the interview with Hugh became an easygoing conversation.

  Paul told us that, in his early days as an actor, he used to go to the bus station just to watch people. But that became impossible with fame.

  “You can’t watch people if they’re watching you. It’s a shame because I miss that.”

  Joanne admitted that while she considers Paul a “star,” she thinks of herself as “a character actress” and that no one recognizes her when she walks down the street. “I even have trouble getti
ng checks cashed,” she said with a laugh.

  They also talked about each other’s performances, as well as their own, in some of their most famous films.

  At the end of the afternoon, they asked the two of us and Rosanne to join them for dinner and a movie. We went back to our hotel to freshen up and then met them at the restaurant. It was about 7:30 when Paul said, “Joanne, what time does the movie start?” She said, “At 8, so we’d better leave or we’ll be late.”

  “Where is the theater?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s not far—on Santa Monica.”

  “Where on Santa Monica2?”

  “I just told you. It’s not far from here.”

  “Joanne, that doesn’t give me a clue where it is. It could be in Denver for all I know.”

  “Don’t worry. I know where it is. Let’s go.”

  Turning to me, Paul said, “Why don’t you just follow me in your car?”

  It was not “far from here,” maybe only a couple of miles, but I had to try to keep up with a Formula One racecar driver. I think he took pity on me, always slowing down just as I was about to lose sight of him.

  JK We finally arrived at the theater, and Paul made a beeline for the refreshments’ counter and asked if he could taste the popcorn. The vendor recognized him, of course, and gave him a free sample. He then bought the largest size available to share with Joanne. The movie was Carmen, a Spanish language film based on the Bizet opera and Mérimée’s novella—with a large dash of flamenco.

  Joanne told me that she and Paul always preferred to sit in the back row. So David went in first, followed by me, Rosanne, Joanne, and Paul, who was on the aisle. To our astonishment, they whispered to each other during the movie, and the people in front kept asking them to be quiet, completely unaware that two famous stars were the source of the noise.

  DH A few weeks later, we filmed them in Connecticut. Joanne had told us that in a future life she will return as prima ballerina, Anna Pavlova, so we shot her taking one of her frequent ballet classes.