Free Paul Newman by Shawn Levy

HAVE BEEN preparing for whatever life it was that was lined up for the heirs to Newman-Stern. Instead, he was on a train headed to Williams Bay, Wisconsin, where he’d received a room-and-board scholarship for a season of summer stock at the Belfry Theater.
    All of Art Newman’s lessons about responsibility and dedication seemed, apparently, to have been in vain. The boy who was never quite able to do the right thing was now throwing his upbringing and education away on a chimera, a quixotic pursuit of art and self-identity more suited to a bohemian or a bum than a college graduate from Shaker Heights. Art’s response, as his son recalled, was “consternation.”
    But it may not have been so severe as all that. For one thing, this wasn’t Newman’s first stab at semiprofessional acting, and his father may have indulged his decision to pursue his chosen path. In the summer after his junior year, he had performed in stock at the Priscilla Beach Theater in Plymouth, Massachusetts. There, according to fellow trouper Terry Lewis, “he told us that he had made a deal with his family. They would support him for a year while he was trying to be an actor, but after the year he either had to go back and work at the store, like his brother, Art, or he was on his own.”
    Certainly the idea that Newman’s future lay either in acting or in the aisles of Newman-Stern rings true. He would forever explain his choice of a potential career not as a calling to thespianism but as aflight from the path that had been lying in wait for him his entire life. “I grew up with the idea that I was going into the sporting goods store,” he confessed. “My whole family, including a couple of uncles, took it for granted.” But that seemed like a trap, and he was too squirrelly by nature to accept that he should simply walk into it. Acting had brought him success at Kenyon; maybe he could keep riding that unlikely streak of good results.
    “I wasn’t ‘searching for my identity,’” he’d later say. “I didn’t have greasepaint in my blood. I was just running away from the family retail business and from merchandising. I just couldn’t find any romance in it. Acting was a happy alternative to a way of life that meant nothing to me.” He confessed that the taste of his college triumphs lingered: “I was instinctively pursuing the only thing I’d ever done really well.” But mainly, he would admit, “I didn’t quite know what to do.”
    So he wound up in Williams Bay, a lakeside vacation spot for well-to-do Chicagoans, and right away they put him to work. His first role was as a soldier in Norman Krasna’s
John Loves Mary.
Next he was cast as the Gentleman Caller in Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie.
In all he stayed nine weeks in Wisconsin and probably appeared in as many plays, and directed a little bit, and came to develop a dislike for the hectic routine of stock acting. Years later, when he was appearing on Broadway, he reflected, “I think the only thing you can do with those, in such a short time to prepare, is to develop your bad mannerisms, or discover possibly successful mannerisms—but mannerisms nevertheless. Sure, what can you do in four days of rehearsal? You can hope to Christ that you can remember your lines, and that’s about as far as it goes.”
    But when the season closed, he decided to stick with the hectic schedule of repertory acting. He moved on to Woodstock, Illinois, an outerlying city of northwest Chicagoland, the longtime home of
Dick Tracy
creator Chester Gould and the fictional birthplace of the famed comic strip lawman. There, in an old-fashioned town center that would someday be the location for the film
Groundhog Day
, stood the Opera House, built in 1889 and home for decades to the Woodstock Players, a troupe that had included among its ranks Tom Bosley, ShelleyBerman, and just the previous season a promising young actress named Geraldine Page. *
    And he wouldn’t make the trip to