The Coolest of Couples #1: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

"Joanne is one of the last of the great broads." 

- Paul Newman 

               

The weirdness aspect here isn't age, but that Paul Newman is actually hotter than his own wife, and yet they were together and happy from the 1950s right through to Newman's recent sad passing. The actual physical beauty of Woodward is not insubstantial, but as Newman is still probably the closest thing cinema has had to a living God, he'd need someone like Rita Hayworth or 1967-era Raquel Welch to be evenly matched. And yet! Newman seemed to have an altruistic gift--an old soul too cool to be shallow--in realizing looks hardly matter at all a few months or years into any relationship, as anyone who's dated a painfully hot girl can tell you.  A woman who is too beautiful becomes like a dagger, stabbing you in the heart with recrimination because, no matter what you do, somehow, you can't live up to her, the ideal, the pedestal, which advertising and the media has helped raise to ludicrous heights in this country... so you end up fighting against becoming an insecure drunken wreck over all the skeevy attention she gets and she instinctively recoils and acts out against your spinelessness by playing it all up, like Marlene Dietrich in DEVIL IS A WOMAN. Conversely however, Newman is almost too hot to cheat, it's just too easy. Men cheat because they need validation; a guy as hot as Newman never needs validation. Also, if you're a girl with a guy like Newman in your hands, you know better than to bother getting jealous, for it is a self-fulfilling prophecy and you got a tiger by the tail.

Woodward's suspected uninhibited sexuality, then, is a blessing that comes with the phenomenon known as "ugly-sexy," i.e. someone is enough themselves that even their conventionally unattractive features become incredibly sexy (perhaps defined ultimately by Serge and daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg). Woodward's healthy lust is something Newman was always quick--even wolfishly proud--to confirm in the press. He praised her as one of those rare and all-but forgotten creatures of the 1960s and 1970s known as broads. These women were extroverted to the extent that their sacral chakras hum like spinning tops. Theirs is actually the highest level of sensuality short of the Tantra.  It's a casual, open-hearted lust that prettier women sometimes never bother to develop, thanks to too much unwanted male attention at too early an age. Instead of an offense, a parlay out into the field to claim a particular prey, the pretty women cultivate a defense against "men" as a whole, a facade of shallow bitchiness that repels close contact but rewards long-distance worship. While gorgeous women become obsessed with making themselves prettier all the time prettier as the clock ticks wrinkles in their eyes, the ugly-sexy girls don't worry so much, and so wiggle free from narcissism's trap, staying eager for the flesh of their opposite rather than their own ego ideal. As a result, ugly-sexy women often get the hottest guys, while the hot girls wind up with rich short dudes, looking around their expensive lofts and wondering 'is this it?'

As for Newman, as goddesses would throw themselves off horses just to touch his garment, carousing around on a midnight creep carries no 'thrill of the chase,' so marrying Woodward and being faithful to the ugly-sexy duckling becomes a key to spiritual enlightenment, as Shakespeare intended; Siddhartha chucking his kingdom for a spot on the river. If Newman spent most of his career free from the shallow insecure vanity that leads men astray, the cause lies perhaps in this sacrifice.

Newman and Woodward's relationship is built, in Newman's words, on "equal parts lust and respect." The "broad" comment atop may be lost on today's generation outside of MAD MEN fans, but I still remember flirting with drunken secretaries at my dad's bridge games as a swingin' eight-year-old in the 1970s. I value and remember those "broads," and if the juggernaut of feminism has them steamrolled, I hope they don't look back on their swinger days with any remorse. They shouldn't. Sex needn't always be a weapon or means to an end. If you give it a little effort you can wiggle free from guilt, shame and repression and just have a good time. It's clear Newman and Woodward did, and they probably helped usher in 1970s permissiveness as a result. Acidemic salutes them unreservedly. 

But blue eyes and Greek god sculpted features, sex and slinkiness, aren't the true measure of Newman as a man, it's his unshowy altruism and Newman's was, and remains, second-to-none. He's a veritable Otto Kruger from MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, as is evidenced in the couple's preference for rural Connecticut over glitzy Hollywood or New York, and in the many amazing food products-- popcorn, salsa, cookies, tomato sauce, you name it--all delicious, well-made, affordable--the profits from which go to charity. Yeah, man, not just "a portion" of the profits but all. ALL PROFITS!  And the company's been a huge success without having to hoist any TV commercials on the public, nothing with Newman in overalls, intoning gravely about the importance of natural ingredients. Just sunny pictures of Newman and sometimes Woodward clad as farmers.

Just look at those sweet elderly beaming faces! So much wisdom. They're in the documentary on LONG HOT SUMMER, looking great and radiating enough matrimonial calm assertiveness to fuel twenty Thin Man movies.

Now, to confess, LONG HOT SUMMER is the only movie of theirs I truly love. PARIS BLUES (1961) and A NEW KIND OF LOVE (1963) were okay but dated in their winky sexytimes.I'd love to see FROM THE TERRACE (1960) but RALLY ROUND THE FLAG BOYS (1958) pissed me off no end, as Newman's character being cock-blocked at every step by bratty children and Woodward's community activist housewife.

Seriously? As a drunk, I couldn't tolerate that the whole beginning of the FLAG involves Newman's struggling to get a much-needed after-work drink: he can't even fit into the crowded bar car on the commuter train home from the city; at home there's barely enough in the liquor cabinet to make one drink, and--right as the lip of the glass is reaching his lips--one of his bratty boys knocks it out of his hand with a pillow thrown from across the room. And the kid is not punished! Rather the dad is supposed to be very tolerant that neither his sexual or alcoholic needs are not being met. And then when Joan Collins--the only other awake, sexually frustrated human being in this gossipy white collar settlement--tries to get him into bed (all the way safely over in Paris, mind you), who should show up but the wife for a surprise visit. Woodward is great, of course, but what's the point of watching a match not burn?

I did stick around for Collins' Pocahontas dance at the Thanksgiving-cum-fertility festival. Whoop! Whoop! And since I'd read Robin Wood's essential but slightly bitter Sexual Politics in Narrative Film, I knew to see it as the "repressed erotic (barred from the home) returning in the exotic" (p. 170) Whoop! Whoop!

Ah, but THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958), that never fails me. Their first co-starring vehicle, it does what so many films, including CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, can only try and do and don't often get right, that whole American Gothic style whoop-whoop that was so hot in the television-competitive Cinemascope-crazy late 1950s. Colliding a couple of Faulkner stories, the film's a great blend of acting styles, with Orson Welles showing what a different film CAT ON A H.T.R would have been had he been Big Daddy (not to knock Burl Ives, who is awesome). Unlike some of their other vehicles, here the passion between Newman and Woodward is allowed to be super hot in its non-hotness, as Newman's hustle only strengthens her spinster resolve-masked fear' masked desire.

Woodward is deliberately school-marmish here the way a modern bisexual hipster chick might be today, all she lacks is granny glasses--promoting an implied gender neutral celibacy via unsexy clothing and carting around devoted and coded momma's boy, Oscar Madison from SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. Gender, man, it's a weird thing when a girl tries to not be sexy. I don't know how to handle it! Neither does Newman. He can't steamroll over it, so he surrenders into a calm, submissive state for the first time in a long, tender yet brilliantly underplayed final monologue.

 Masters of staying humble and in character, there's no more spark or heat than needed between these two, yet they still sizzle. Their bond develops naturally through antagonism and begrudging respect-- though offscreen they were--according to the DVD extras---racing away on weekends during the hot Southern shoot, down to Florida to ball all night and party every day. Man, I know what it's like to be in love, don't you? If not, just learn from the masters: Newman and Woodward were a solid front, completely devoted, and it helped no doubt that they were in acting class together and probably got all inside each others' heads through hours of improv and exercise. It's hard to have a lead role and not know yourself pretty well, otherwise you spill your own issues all over a character's clothes. Newman and Woodward never spill a drop, and the result is great acting. So often stars dictates to what extent the supporting characters around them are allowed to flesh out and develop in any particular movie (they don't want anyone stealing the show). No one in the family dynamic here feels the need to spell out their connections to one another in any showy or expository manner. It's all direct non/interaction, immediate, forceful! It cuts through the artifices of poetry and grabs right at the bull's balls.

Orson alone seems oblivious to such dynamics, and is thus superb as we see the way living with such a boisterous, animal breeding tyrant--no matter how benevolent and witty he may be--takes its toll on his children and shows in Fanciosa's and Woodwards' sense memory resignation. Welles' complete obliviousness to all but his own charm links him to Kane and Quinlan, and matches a current of self-loathing running below Newman's self-satisfied drifter--a mutual respect forms between them, one not sullied by confusing issues of trust.

But it's humility and vulnerability that win out-- in LONG HOT SUMMER and in the Woodward-Newman pair-bond, and this is no doubt a huge aspect of this couple's success on every level of their life. As they said in later years, their relationship was built on affection and tolerance, an understanding they didn't need to meddle in every aspect of each other's life (Newman: "You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each others' necks ... We are very, very different people and yet somehow we fed off those varied differences and instead of separating us, it has made the whole bond a lot stronger.”) Joanne hated Paul's auto racing passion for example, Newman notes: "Joanne fell out of bed the other night and broke her collarbone. As she lay on the ground, I said to her, 'I'm not going to listen to any more complaining about my racing!' " (source/aboutdotcom)

We should all be so lucky to have someone in our lives we enjoy doing stuff with together and tolerating/staying out of the way of whatever else we like to do that they don't, and encouraging and not judging and doing their own thing. We should all have someone who we love enough that we never worry what the world might think, of them, of us, of our acting-- not even of what the one we love thinks of our racing.  For if our intentions are pure and loving and there's no doubt in our mind the effect we bring will be benevolent, it then becomes your job then to give thanks and give back and to love one another, as long as you both shall live, not to scratch your insecurities down each others' backs, not to drag each other down, but to support one another on each others' quest for happiness, to provide back-up when needed and to back-off when needed as well. You could say that for their relationship and for their acting; they aced all categories.