Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  She came to New York where she was interviewed by Eva Marie Saint’s husband for another film, but “he didn’t like me either, so I spent the winter going to the Actors Studio. I had some money saved from Greece, but I didn’t need much. I don’t spend a lot. If I have one pair of shoes, it’s enough. I had only one dress when I came here, but I just washed it and put it on again. Who needs a second dress?”

  Finally she went back to Greece in despair and toured with the National Popular Theatre for two years in plays like Inherit the Wind and Merchant of Venice and starred in films like Zorba the Greek and Elektra, gradually building her protean talents into an international reputation which now requires her to give as much of herself as a 24-hour day will allow. She has no children, although she has been married (“one and a half times,” she tosses off, without explaining). Currently she has two unreleased films (“One is a comedy—I don’t think they can sell it”) and she’s making a third during the day in New York. “It’s called The Brotherhood and it’s about the Mafia. I play Kirk Douglas’ wife. It’s not such a great part, but I need the money. Like most Greeks, I am supporting several people back home.”

  Has her best work been in movies or onstage? “I haven’t done my best work yet” is the simple, direct answer. Then the big black eyes turn moist and she seems on the verge of tears. “Many things I do just for money because I don’t know how to make a living any other way. I miss that, not having done something more important with my life. I’m very sad that I may have to spend the rest of my life as an actress. Acting depends on love, and I never know—I’m never certain—if people love me. My sister Elektra is an archaeologist. My other sister, Leda, is a radiotherapist in Athens working on a cure for cancer. Those are wonderful, important jobs. They have done so much more with their lives than I have with mine. If I was in science, making a rocket fly, then nobody could say I didn’t do that. But with acting, people are never sure. I feel I am not good enough. I’m always looking into people’s eyes to see if they like me. That’s my proof of being alive. And that’s why actors are so unsteady, so unhappy. It’s a profession of doubt. You have no God, no love. Life gives you nothing to hold onto. So every night I feel nervous, nauseated. I’m not a happy person. I’m moody. There is a beautiful word in Greek—apolotriosis. It means you are confiscated. You don’t belong, but nobody can kill you. That’s what I feel every night when I walk onstage. They may hate me and I may fail them, but they can’t kill me. I have no ego and no ambition. I’m like a cow you milk milk milk and then it finally gives you a kick. I feel like kicking back, but I never do.”

  “But now you are more successful than ever—”

  “What is success? After Elektra won all the international film prizes, I didn’t work for two years. After Zorba I didn’t work for a year and a half. I’m loved and admired, then dismissed with laurels. It’s never been an easy life, acting. Blood and sweat, as we say in Greece. I’ve never made much money. For Zorba, my most popular film, I made only $10,000. I am not a star people pay money to see. They take my blood instead and I’m always there to give it. Every time I begin a new project I nearly die. When we started rehearsals for Iphegenia Cacoyannis said to me—he knows me so well—‘OK, Irene, let’s go through that birth-giving again,’ and he was right. And even now, when they applaud, I wonder if another actress couldn’t do it better. I feel a tremendous responsibility to those young faces in the audience. I wonder every night if I have studied enough history, or read enough books, or lived through enough pain to give them what they deserve. If you are cobbler you know if your shoes are worth the public’s dollars, but I live my whole life wondering—am I worth it?”

  Gathering up her pride, with no more difficulty than if she were closing a door, she is gone before the answer comes. Home to her 66-year-old mother, waiting in some tiny West Side hotel. And leaving me behind with a lump in my throat, wondering why it is sometimes so hard to say “Yes.”

  Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

  The hand-painted sign on the sculptured lawn of the sculptured house in Beverly Hills reads: “PLEASE—THEY HAVE MOVED!—THE PIERSONS.” Of course, there are no Piersons. The sign is a voodoo gris-gris Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward have put up to discourage the myriads of tourists who drive by with movie-star maps, get out of their Toyota Coronas and trample on the sculptured lawn of the sculptured house, taking snapshots with their Brownie Instamatics. If only they were lucky enough to get inside the house, they’d have a lot more fun.

  Standing in the kitchen door at the back of the house is a busy dandelion of a child, a 7-year-old femme fatale named Lissy Newman, who promptly announces: “Mommy’s on the telephone. She’s always on the telephone. May I have a cigarette? Cigarettes are very bad for you. You shouldn’t smoke.” Lissy never stops talking and when you meet her parents you know exactly why. Lissy fakes it with an unlit True cigarette as she leads the way through the kitchen, where a chauffeur sits reading the afternoon paper, into the library, where Joanne motions to a sprawling sofa. She is eating chocolate-chip cookies and drinking iced coffee. The female half of the Newman team, she is the star without an image, the girl with many faces, none of which ever get recognized by clerks in dime stores who riot when her husband walks in. She has glorious white skin, twinkling naughty eyes which always clue you in to the fact that encyclopedias are being written behind them, and her hair is long and golden and soaking wet because she has just come from a ballet class she takes with the UCLA football team. (Ballet is Joanne’s favorite thing in the world—for Christmas, Paul gave her a complete print of the Nureyev-Fonteyn Romeo and Juliet and she will do all the leaps if you will just ask her.)

  Lissy is still faking it with the True and explaining in great detail that her sister, a 9-year-old femme fatale named Nell, has taken Baron, the family sparrow hawk, to the bird doctor, when Paul Newman bursts into the room in tennis shorts and a rumpled white T-shirt with a sheaf of papers in his hands and a defeated look on his face. “I’m writing a speech for Eugene McCarthy and it has to be ready in three hours. You don’t want to write a speech for me, do you?”

  There they are, America’s jet-age Doug and Mary, nibbling on cookies in a swank rose-carpeted, paneled library that has nothing to do with the way they live. Jack Armstrong and Scarlett O’Hara in basketball shoes. “Out!” says Scarlett, with a delicate Southern accent that is more pure-bred moonshine and magnolia blossom than hominy grits, to Lissy, who is now standing on her head in the middle of the room. “I have to be interviewed and how can we get anything done if you are talking all the time?” “I won’t talk; I’ll just stand on my head.” “Go help Daddy write his McCarthy speech.” Paul scoops up Lissy, still upside down, and carries her out to the pool where her violence won’t be so loud, and although by now it is no longer clear what anyone has come to talk about, it seems like the interview is on. More or less.

  Joanne doesn’t really do interviews. Even though she’s the only member of the Newman family who has won an Oscar, she has always been content to take a back seat to the fame and glamour, preferring to emerge in the roles she plays instead of phony interviews. But like most Southern girls, she’s never at a loss for words and in her case the words always sound fascinating. (She has an IQ of 135, higher than 90 percent of the doctors at Bellevue.) And on this summer day, with the California sun licking at the windows like tongues on an Eskimo Pie, she has something worth talking about—a film she’s proud of, called Rachel, Rachel, in which her performance as a 35-year-old spinster living with her mother above the Japonica Funeral Chapel is so remarkable it could be the beginning of a whole new career. “Paul gets all the wonderful parts, but I always seem to be the after-thought, like the backstop who stands behind the pitcher. You know, even a bad movie takes two or three months out of your life, so I finally decided that if I am going to take that much time out of a life I enjoy, it better be something I bloody well care about. For a script like that, I have to find it myself. Good things are seldom offere
d to me. When I started, I just wanted to act. That’s all I cared about. I did some good things, like Three Faces of Eve, but I also did some things I didn’t care about. Now the older I get the more I realize that life is like cotton candy. Take one bite and it’s gone. Life is too short to worry about the tiny dissatisfactions. They’re a pain in the ass. I hate wasting time. Like the tourists driving around on Sunday afternoons looking at movie-star houses. They could get killed tomorrow and what do they have to show for it? They spent their last day on earth looking at Paul Newman’s house. I refuse to fiddle away my life in dribs and drabs. One thing I say to the kids—‘Tell me anything, get mad, yell at me, but never say you’re bored.’

  “People kept asking ‘Whatever happened to Joanne Woodward?’ Well, she got bored waiting around. That’s why I was attracted to Rachel, Rachel. Its theme is that things never stop, tomorrow is another day. I felt very unhappy and discouraged and I felt my career had ended. I’m not a movie star anyway. I’ve never been the same person twice in movies and Hollywood never really knew what to do with me. So when you’re in that boat, you either become an enormously successful established character actress or you do anything you can get. I was determined I’d rather do nothing than just work for the sake of having a job, and I was even more determined I’d never do anything again unless I felt strongly about it. One day John Forman called. He was our agent once and now he, Paul and I have formed a company. We’ve known him for years. He got me my first job fresh out of Greenville, South Carolina, in an old Robert Montgomery TV show. Anyway, he had read a review of this book called A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence, a Canadian writer, and we got the galleys and decided to take an option on it. Paul couldn’t believe we had done that. Then when he read the book I don’t think he liked it much.” Her eyes droop into one of those Poor Pitiful Pearl Doll looks as she imitates Paul: “Not movie material.” Then the sun breaks through in her smile and she’s as pretty as one of Irwin Shaw’s girls in their summer dresses. “Paul had no intention of directing it, but we couldn’t get anyone else interested. Stewart Stern, who wrote the screenplay, and I went around offering ourselves to everybody, but I’m afraid offering a package of the script and me was hardly like offering Elizabeth Taylor and Tennessee Williams.”

  But somehow they did it. They did it because, even when saddled with Hollywood slag far beneath their dignity or ability, the Newmans have always remained individuals, with firm grips on their identities. They both have minds of their own, in a business where actors tend to think collectively. And it would take two nose-thumbing, tasteful, anti-Establishment rebels with strong convictions to make a film like Rachel, Rachel. It wasn’t easy. Even after Paul put his name in the pot, every major studio in Hollywood turned them down, sniffing with typical chaotic irrationalization, “Newman’s a star, it’s too big a gamble to let him direct; Woodward’s not a financeable name.” They both had to commit a chunk of their lives away to get Warners-Seven Arts to finance their film, but they have now surprised all the skeptics by delivering their package for less than $800,000 (a feat unheard of these days with names like the Newmans involved). And they have surprised everyone even more by turning out not just another Hollywood junk collage the big studios grind out yearly like cheese sandwiches, but a thoughtful, provocative, moving, undeniably unique movie. Now the question looming ahead like the Hollywood Freeway—will it sell?

  “I hope it’s successful,” says Paul, “not because of any financial reward—hell, both Joanne and I did it for nothing—but to prove to Hollywood you can make a film about basic, simple people without sex and violence and a band of Indians scalping the settlers. I don’t know. People get embarrassed by their own involvement. They want fantasy and they want to keep their cool at the same time. They can’t help but be involved here. But the film represents something we had to do and we did it.”

  “It just kind of happened,” says Joanne, watching Paul slave over his McCarthy speech. “We talked about it and one day we found ourselves all sitting around in Palm Springs writing the script. Actually the men did all the work while in the best tradition of the Southern belle I sat around and fanned myself and drank lemonade. I’m not much of a pusher.”

  She means it. She has always refused to become one of those sad little dumplings who fall into their swimming pools and melt there. While other stars are busy hiring and firing butlers and imported Swedish masseurs, Joanne dodges the Hollywood scene and spends all of her free time in her converted barn in Westport, Connecticut, designed by Broadway set designer Ralph Alswang and set in three acres of apple trees and riverbanks. She hates Hollywood’s superficiality and her frankness on the subject has not always made her popular here. “Listen,” she laughs, scratching her toe, “I’ve been knocking Hollywood so long it’s become a joke out here. I don’t like it and that’s all there is to it and I don’t really know why. Maybe I’m perverse. Life is pleasant, but it’s just not me. It will never be home. This house is not me. It’s rented out all the time. The kids went to a school that was very proper, all straight A’s and Debbie Reynolds was head of the Girl Scouts, you know what I mean? I couldn’t wait to get them out of there. I don’t like the way Beverly Hills looks. I loathe manicured lawns and I hate palm trees. We just sold this house and we’re moving into a place with a prize-winning cactus and three of the biggest palm trees you ever saw in the yard and I’m having them all cut down and planting magnolia trees and rose bushes. People expect us to have big houses and servants and the whole schmeer, but I hate houses with no personality and I feel guilty having servants with nothing to do. I had to let the secretary go because every time I passed the library, she was just sitting there buffing her nails. We have a driver who takes the kids to school, but I have to keep thinking of things for him to do. LISSY!”

  Lissy comes in wearing a fresh new pinafore, eating a limb from one of the trees on the sculptured lawn. “Get the driver to take you down to the store and buy some pencils.” Lissy leaps at the idea of some action on this otherwise lethargic Beverly Hills afternoon and is gone like a shot. With Paul’s three children (Stephanie, Susan and Scott) and Paul and Joanne’s three (Nell, Lissy and baby Clea) there are six junior-sized Newmans hanging from the rafters and none of them seems a bit impressed by the fact that they are living with two of the biggest movie stars in the world. “Now that Nell is a movie star herself in Rachel, Rachel, Stephanie wants to be one too. She’s 13 and just hates it because she’s flat-chested. The kids are all marvelous and beautiful and slightly insane—five beautiful blonde ladies and Scott, who is 18 and looks like a French film star. That’s what my life is all about. We never read anything that is ever written about either of us in magazines. The only magazine we subscribe to is Child Life. We used to take everything, but they kept following us around the world and we had to pay extra postage. I do love the National Geographic, though. It was the only magazine as a child that you ever saw people naked in. Paul gets all the fan mail and I read everything that comes to the house. I’m still waiting for the one that begins, ‘Gee baby, you were great.’ The only fan mail I ever get is from 12-year-old boys. One wrote, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, you’re six months older than my mother.’ We don’t have many kooks hanging around. Occasionally Paul gets the oddballs who want him to take off his sunglasses so they can see his blue eyes, but usually he gets a different breed, which I think is an interesting comment on his dignity as a human being. It must be sad to be an Elizabeth Taylor, who hasn’t been to a supermarket for ten years. I couldn’t stand that. I remember going to an Actors Studio premiere once for Kazan’s film East of Eden. Marilyn Monroe was there and it was one of the most horrible sights I ever witnessed— watching her be grabbed at and mauled. That little white face in that sea of hands. We just don’t allow that to happen. Oh, there are a couple of things we can’t do any more. Paul can’t take the kids to Disneyland because he gets mobbed and the kids don’t get to see anything. He took them to the World’s Fair and had to be slip
ped into back doors and things and it was no fun. But it’s a small price to pay for everything else.”

  No need to explain the folks-next-door image any more. The room has suddenly turned into a script for “Ethel and Albert.” Paul bursts in with a mug of iced lager, beaming like the kid who just won the potato-sack race. “Just got the news! Rachel is going to open the San Francisco Film Festival in October!”

  “Sit down and eat some celery before you blow your cool,” says Joanne, sounding like she was back in the freshman dorm at Louisiana State University. “Paul’s trying to stop smoking and he has to eat celery.”

  Paul is lying on the floor in his tennis shorts, showing me how he keeps his stomach flat after drinking so much beer. We’re suddenly both on the floor, raising our legs and pushing our heads through our knees to stretch our stomach muscles while two cats named Snowflake and Black Basil are walking across our chests. “That Black Basil is going to be a great prick when he grows up,” says Paul on a deep knee-bend.

  “How dare you say that?” gasps Joanne, indignant. “Black Basil has more dignity than any cat I know.”

  “We have five cats and they’re all pricks,” says Paul to his kneecaps. “We’re the only people I know who carry more dog and cat boxes on planes than luggage.”

  “We only have four cats now. Cassandra wandered off and we never did find her. She was a great striped cat with eight fingers on each toe.”

  “Eight fingers on each toe,” gasps Paul between stomach bends on the floor. “That is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of!”

  It is quite obvious by now that the interview is over. The kids are home, flying through the house totally unlike anybody’s idea of what Hollywood children were like in the old Margaret O’Brien days, chased by the barkingest, howlingest contingent of neighborhood dogs this side of the Los Angeles City Pound. Two makeup artists from Universal are waiting upstairs to Max Factor Joanne into another of the many faces of Eve for the film she is currently working on, a race-car movie called Winning with Paul and Robert Wagner. Dignified? Snobby, now that she is the star of a very important new art-house movie everybody’s talking about? “Ha!” cackles Joanne. “We’re calling the new movie ‘Cool Hand Luke Finds Rachel in the Sack with The Thief!’”