Word: newman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...journey to this poignant, uneven movie, through a succession of worse and better ones, began in Cleveland Heights, a comfortable suburb of Cleveland, where Paul was born in 1925. He was the second son of Arthur S. Newman, a prosperous Jewish partner in a sporting-goods store, and Theresa Fetzer, a Hungarian-descended Catholic. By the time Paul and his brother Arthur, now 58, a film production manager living in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., were children, Theresa was a Christian Scientist. Paul's exposure to that faith did not make any lasting impression (he has followed no religion...
...Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, he joined the student dramatic society after being kicked off the second-string football team because of a barroom squabble. His drama professor, James Michael, remembers "having trouble not casting Paul as the lead in every play," but Newman remembers being a very bad actor. His self-assessment then and now is of a very slow study without much natural talent for anything except concentration and tenacity. "I was terrorized by the emotional requirements of being an actor," he recalls. "Acting is like letting your pants down; you're exposed...
There was a family echo here. Arthur Newman, "a brilliant, erudite man" with "a marvelous, whimsical sense of humor," at 17 had been the youngest reporter ever hired by the Cleveland Press, Paul says, but he had quit to go into the family business. Newman is uncharacteristically subdued in recalling his father: "I think he always thought of me as pretty much of a lightweight. He treated me like he was disappointed in me a lot of the time, and he had every right to be. It has been one of the great agonies of my life that he could...
Paul was set free when his family decided to sell the store. In September 1951, with Jackie and Scott, he headed toward New Haven to enroll in the Yale University School of Drama. "I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion," says Newman, who was 26 then; "I was running away from the sporting goods business...
...following June he was in New York. He got a couple of small television parts and then, for $150 a week, a job understudying Leading Man Ralph Meeker in a new play, William Inge's Picnic. Later, when Meeker went on vacation, Newman took his place for a week in the sexually charged lead role. He asked Director Josh Logan, on the strength of his performance, whether he could take Meeker's role when the play went on the road. Said Logan: "I don't think so because you don't carry any sexual threat." Newman...