The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: a Memoir by Paul Newman

Author:Paul Newman [Newman, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof did tremendously at the box office, staying at number one for over a month. It also got me my first Oscar nomination; the movie itself was up for Best Picture while Elizabeth and Dick Brooks also received slots, for Best Actress and Best Director. (Burl Ives was nominated as well—and won—Best Supporting Actor that year, but it was for Big Country, not for our movie.)

By now, I’d become something of a movie star, I suppose, and I had the opportunity to go back to Broadway to work under Elia Kazan for his production of a new Tennessee Williams play, Sweet Bird of Youth. I’d play Chance Wayne, essentially a gigolo, who’s attached himself to an aging, alcoholic actress, the Princess. One of the main prerequisites of Chance is that he is a person of external beauty, he’d gotten by on that, and now that personal beauty is beginning to fade.

Kazan, when I signed, was not a person to me at all, but a symbol of The Director. Kazan wanted to get acquainted with me, feel me out, get a sense of what I was like offstage, so we went for a walk in the city. I was quaking in my boots. He told me what he expected from certain sections of the play, especially Chance’s soliloquy when he talks about seeing his true-love real girlfriend for the last time. Kazan wanted to create a great sense of personal grief for Chance. Because I felt obligated to tell him the truth (so that he wouldn’t expect anything), I interrupted and told him that I was something of an “emotional Republican.” Nevertheless, I said, I thought I could do it. I wasn’t really worried whether I could deliver for an audience that wasn’t as savvy as Kazan, but the test for me was whether I could get it by him. I wondered: how does a person who is anesthetized in real life tap a core of emotion that would be available for someone else to feel?

When we tried it on the stage, Kazan told me, “I want you to treat this soliloquy as an echo, a series of echoes that come back to you and that are so strong you can’t control your emotions.” As I began working on it, sometimes a trickle of emotion or a tear came, but I never knew when or if that would be there.

I had warned Kazan that sometimes it would hit me and it would be organic, but there’d be occasions that it didn’t. Those times, I would stare at a light in the back of the auditorium long enough so it would make me tear up, since I have no light tolerance. Kazan would move around the auditorium, going from seat to seat, to find out which things I was doing seemed real, and which didn’t. He wanted to check if he could hear you in the back of the house, and whether the size of what you

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