Free Paul Newman by Shawn Levy Page B

Tammeuses and their four children.
    Shared it, as in literally. Barbara, the Tammeuses’ second oldest, remembered, “When I about seven years old, on a warm, sunny afternoon,I was taking one of my monthly baths and was scrunched down in the water enjoying what I hated to do, take a bath. The door to the bathroom off the kitchen opened, then closed, and Paul, reading a
Time
magazine, dressed in his usual blue jeans and white undershirt and [with] bare feet, walked to the john and sat down. Moments later when I rose up out of the water, he said, obviously not having seen me on his way in, ‘Oh, hi. Well, I’m going to finish.’ And he did. He then got up, walked out while still reading
Time
, and didn’t say another word.”
    The Players’ shows were poorly attended. Kurt Wanieck managed the theater, and he had hired Newman, who, he remembered, “was just a good-lookin’ blue-eyed guy.” According to Wanieck, the bugaboo wasn’t the quality of the productions or the choice of material but rather TV. By 1948 more than one million television sets were in use in the United States, with four national networks broadcasting programs featuring such overnight stars as Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan. “People just started to stay home to get their entertainment,” Wanieck said.
    The movie business took a hit—1948 would be the year in which it sold fewer tickets than any other since, even with the American population increasing annually. And live theaters got hit even worse. “If twenty or thirty people came out, that was a good showing,” Bill Tammeus remembered. But like Newman, he blamed not Uncle Miltie for the poor turnout but rather the pace of the Opera House production schedule: sixteen shows in sixteen weeks. He depicted a company “trying to learn the stuff by heart in a hurry… They put on too many plays in too short a period of time. It was a different play every week.” Among the quickly revolving slate of shows was
Our Town
, in which Newman played the Stage Manager (and in which Karin Tammeus had a role), and
Cyrano de Bergerac
, in which Newman was cast rather uncomfortably to type as the attractive but dim-witted would-be courtier Christian. “Paul was not a leading man,” Tammeus stated bluntly.
    But he was a trouper: Newman was keen on sitting up nights and talking about the latest production with Jackie and the other actors. “The best thing he could do while he was here was eat popcorn,” Tammeus said. “That guy would eat a dishpan full of popcorn at least once a day. When they came home about midnight after the play, he would make the popcorn and go up to his room to talk about the play, eatpopcorn, and have a beer.” As the winter season came to a close, Newman found that he needed to supplement his diminishing earnings as an actor, and so he took work at Bill Tittle’s farm just outside town. “He shocked grain like any other farmer would,” Tammeus recalled. *
    The image of him out in those fields in early 1950 doing the work of a laborer seems unlikely, but at some level the quiet of the outdoors and the dulling routine of farm work must have come as welcome distractions. Sometime that winter he learned that Jackie was pregnant. And in the spring, just as he was looking for another summer theatrical job, he got a terrible phone call at the Tammeus house: Art Newman had died.
    “I remember it really clearly,” Karin said. “It was five or six in the evening, and he was speaking on the phone in the kitchen, and then he sat at the table to talk with my parents. He realized that might be the end of his career. He felt that he would have to go back and take over the family business, and that horrified him.”
    The next day, with his pregnant wife and his empty sack of prospects, he drove home to Cleveland in a 1937 Packard he’d bought for $150. “They just left,” Karin remembered. “It was just a very sad day for all of us.”
    A RT N EWMAN had fallen ill suddenly about six weeks