"For Paul Newman’s 96th birthday, his lost cinematic masterpiece," part 2

by Allan M. Jalon

[This is Part 2 of my reposting of Allan M. Jalon’s article about the film Paul Newman directed and produced based on playwright Anton Chekhov’s short monodrama, On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.  Even of you knew that the actor had made this movie—and few in the public did—you surely had little idea of the story behind it.  I find this account both fascinating and emotionally engaging.

[If you haven’t read Part 1 of Jalon’s repost, you really must go back to 5 February and start at the beginning.  Then come back and pick up the continuation.]

I believe Strong and Newman may have adapted their script from a 1954 translation by Avrahm Yarmolinsky [1890-1975], a Russian-Jewish émigré who then oversaw the Slavic section of the New York Public Library. Yarmolinsky wrote that he did his Chekhov work in part to stress the humanity of Russian culture amid the Soviet Union’s inhumanity. His translation, which he asserted to be the first in English, appeared soon after [Soviet leader] Joseph Stalin [1878-1953] had died, not long after his last anti-Semitic purges. The world was watching to see how much would change under Nikita Khrushchev [1894-1971].

Newman and [actor Michael] Strong aren’t known to have had political motives, but Cold War politics framed the times. I find it hard to believe that the son of Arthur Newman, coming of age in an Actors Studio that Patricia Bosworth told me was “like a Jewish family,” wouldn’t sense the Jewish feeling for Chekhov that surrounded him.

When he visited the set, [composer David] Amram recalled, he noticed that Newman “used a lot of sensitivity to bring out the best in people. He’d talk to them, get them to think about what they were doing. Kazan did that.”

“There was the opening scene with the little dog on the street. Paul did this over and over. He cared about the timing of that little scene, which they shot out of doors.”

Amram noted “how reinforcing” Newman was with Strong, “encouraging him” to find his own best way to his part, adding, “Paul went out of his way to treat the sound men, the camera men, with respect.”

The filming took five October days on the Lower East Side, and one faded photograph shows Newman standing in a sailor’s cap, sipping coffee, watching as a make-up artist combed the goatee Strong wore as Nyukhin.

When the shoot finished, Newman leaned over a desk in Amram’s apartment, toward a Moviola machine on which they turned the finished print beneath a lens, back and forth, matching sound to images. Amram recalls his work on “every image,” fitting chords to the moment Strong’s character lifted his chin to sing a hymn, or adding a sharp viola note to underscore a flash of the man’s anger.

One of the two violists was Midhat Serbagi [b. ca. 1931], an old army friend of Amram’s. Midhat had a brother, Roger Serbagi [b. 1937], a young actor. The Serbagi brothers spent an afternoon drinking Budweisers with Newman as he and Amram worked at the Moviola, and that memory stays with them today.

“I told him I wanted to be an actor, and he said great, was very encouraging,” Roger Serbagi told me. He said that Newman hired him for a small part in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” [1972; based on a 1964 play by Paul Zindel, 1936-2003] Roger Serbagi recalled: “I asked him, ‘Do you remember me from that afternoon at David’s?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I remember you.’”

Newman followers generally don’t count “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco” among the Newman-directed films, saying there are six, listing “Rachel, Rachel” [1968] as his first. Film historians care about such things, and I imagine that the new chance to see the rediscovered film may prompt them to add it to the list and count as seven the number of films that Newman made behind the camera.

Amram confirmed my sense that Newman consciously made his film outside the Hollywood studio system, perhaps even in defiance of it. The composer said he sensed how intently the star sought to probe the intimacies of theater with the powers of film, at a time when doing that was part of a high-minded populism in the early years of TV. Just a year later, Michael Strong worked as the bartender Chuck in Sidney Lumet’s hauntingly lucid TV version of Eugene O’Neil[l]’s “The Iceman Cometh” [CBS, 1960]. Newman worked with his 1950s-rooted theater-meets-film mode until “The Glass Menagerie” [1987] his last directing effort.

Meanwhile, Midhat Serbagi recalled seeing the Chekhov film, when Newman showed it to the creative team, and loving it. Amram remembers “some little screening room,” midtown, and said he watched with pride how the project had turned into “a Hollywood film but not by Hollywood.”

“Exodus” soon claimed Newman’s attention, getting mixed reviews in 1961. That year, Strong had a role next to Zero Mostel [1915-77] and Eli Wallach in Eugene Ionesco’s [1909-94] darkly absurdist “Rhinoceros.” It was also the year when “Something Wild,” Garfein’s allegory of hard-bitten renewal, appeared; Newman won acclaim for his acting in “The Hustler” [1961] about the brutal price a pool shark pays for a changed life.

The next January, with the Kennedy administration in its second year, Newman rented two movie houses, the Baronet in New York and the CinemaTheatre in L.A..— for a short period (just how long, I couldn’t determine). Why he took three years to make his move for the film, no one I’ve talked to knows. A New York Times film critic named A. H. Weiler [1908-2002] stopped by the long-gone Baronet on East 59th Street and wrote a full-length review of “Murder She Said” [1961 film based on the 1957 novel 4:50 from Paddington], an Agatha Christie [1890-1976] mystery, and added a one-line rave of the “top-flight, one-man tour de force by Michael Strong” [“Screen: Old-Maid Sleuth,” 8 Jan. 1962] in Newman’s film.

Advertisements quoting the review ran in Variety and in The Hollywood Reporter, asking Academy Award judges to see Strong in his starring role.

Strong was already 41 when Newman focused on him across the 25 minutes and 30 seconds of the Chekhov adaptation. For decades, his friend Karl Malden and others had hoped he’d get such a chance at star-level attention. “I hope to God your break comes soon,” Kirk Douglas had written him in a letter a decade earlier.

Surely, this might be Strong’s late break. Others sensed it. The esteemed Broadway writer-actor Howard Linds[a]y [1889-1968] wrote him after seeing the Newman film: “We hope it wins an Oscar.” 

But it didn’t happen.

All I know about what followed comes from Garfein, who was in Paris at the time. He says Strong called him long distance, distraught that Newman had met him in a Greenwich Village cafe, handed him the film print and said he’d wiped his name from the credits. He’d work no more to get it seen.

“I remember the pain in his voice,” Garfein recalled. “He said, ‘I have really terrible news. Paul took his name off the film. He handed me the film, and told me, Mike, it’s yours now. Do what you want with it.’

“This wasn’t just a role to [Strong]. He felt he’d put his whole life into this film. He worried that nobody would ever see it. Because Paul had turned it down, he felt he wouldn’t get distribution. Who’d want it now?”

THE HARMFULNESS OF ABANDONMENT

Just what pulled Newman away from his film? Biographers give hints. One wrote, without naming a source, that it disappointed him. Another suggested that his wife, actress Joanne Woodward [b. 1930], discouraged him from releasing it. “My wife must have thought I was on dope,” Newman says in an unsourced footnote in Shawn Levy’s biography “Paul Newman: A Life,” which also quotes Newman as calling the film “the best creative experience I ever had.”

“I think he couldn’t find a distributor for it,” Garfein speculated. But short films were shown theatrically then. Joanne Woodward might have been able to say what happened next, but I’ve been told she’s ill. And, Newmans’ [sic] three daughters showed no interest in talking to me.

Strong’s two children did speak with me, though. Paul Strong, born in 1942, is a retired literature professor and Hemingway scholar; Ellen Strong, his sister, was born in 1955 and is a social worker. They sustain their father’s memory with clear affection and informed pride in his career. Paul Strong admitted to me that he had visited the set of “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco,” but not to watch his father act. “I wanted to meet Paul Newman,” he said.

The film became something of a family legend. The siblings held on to memories of it, and can describe parts in detail. Paul Strong believes he attended the New York showing in 1962. His sister says her father screened it privately for her at least once. She recounted, with a laugh, “That dog — and that he never really talks about tobacco.”

Paul Strong spoke of growing up with his actor-father and a mother, the former Theda Kropf [1918-2004], who studied acting with Strong at Brooklyn College in the 1930s but became a kindergarten teacher. The couple later taught theater together at Camp Unity, a left-leaning interracial summer camp for adults in upstate Wingdale, New York.

Once married, they lived in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, where Paul Strong said he grew up among other theater families. He spoke of grandparents from whom he heard Russian and Yiddish. Paul recalled his father in bed in the mornings, still wearing make-up from nights onstage, and said his father funded his son’s wish to attend a small, private liberal arts college — which no one in the family had done — with an especially lucrative acting stretch in the spring of 1959, Paul Strong’s senior year in high school.

Michael Strong understudied Jack Klugman [1922-2012] in the role of Herbie in the hit musical “Gypsy” [1959], and had a regular part in “The Edge of Night” [CBS, 1956-75; ABC, 1975-84], a soap opera. His son went to Colby College, where he met his future wife and studied literature with an analytical focus that he says was “very different from how my father got to his characters.[“]

“I don’t think of my father as an introspective man. I think of him as a method actor. I know he learned a lot at the Actors Studio, from Kazan and Strasberg. He was serious about his craft. But he was very intuitive about how he would do a role.”

Ellen Strong, on the phone from her home near San Francisco, said her father’s reserve sometimes cracked and she could glimpse his pain from the rejection-acceptance rollercoaster of an actor’s life. “Every time he finished a job, he worried he’d never get another,” she said. In a rare interview focused on him, Strong once told a reporter: “To be a working actor, you must have the soul of an angel and the skin of a rhinoceros.”

Paul Strong’s two grown children, Amy and Michael, were close to their grandfather, and knew he’d made a film with Paul Newman. They’d seen the film box, but grew up without seeing the film.

None of Michael Strong’s offspring doubts that the day in January 1962 when Newman handed him the film was devastating.

Still, he must have sensed trouble already, and the Oscar showing may have been a Hail Mary pass for a project that needed allies. In late 1961, Strong — possibly at Newman’s urging — made one more effort to try to save the film.

ADVICE FROM THE ARCHIVES

There’s a single archival box identified as “The Michael Strong Papers” at the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, located at Lincoln Center. That an actor so little known should have an official archive was my good luck, but it struck me as unusual.

I learned it was donated by his widowed second wife, an actress named Diane Shalet [1935-2006]. Later, I’d also find that she was the key to the Newman film’s survival. After Strong died, she wrote a true-to-life novel—“Grief in a Sunny Climate” — about a woman who loses an actor husband named Michael.

Published in 1994, to warm reviews, it was a dark comedy in which the wife, who is also the narrator, struggles to find her way without Michael. I’ve worked with archives before, but never one so clearly assembled as an act of devotion.

Shalet left one box of playbills, reviews, photographs and letters that Strong received. One of them offers evidence that Strong decided (I think he and Newman may have made the move together) to seek advice from an unusual insider about how to market their film. It’s a single-spaced letter obviously written as a response to Strong, typed across two half-pages of New York Times stationery and signed by Howard Thompson.

He was the same Times writer who’d written the pan of Newman in “The Left Handed Gun” and mocked him for a screen personality split “between the Moscow Art Theater and the Grand Ole Opry.” He’d also written about Newman’s exclamation that he’d burn the Checkhov [sic] film if he didn’t like it.

Now, he’s clearly seen the finished version (it was a few weeks until it had its public screening), and he had loved it. His feeling for the film, his admiration for Strong and Newman, whom he sees as a fast-rising movie star — are all clear from his letter. Thompson, a cousin of the Times’ then-managing editor (soon executive editor), Turner Catledge [1901-83], replied to Strong with a pointed effort to get the film distribution. Reporters are supposed to follow a professional ethos of detachment, though the Kennedy era was another time. But when Thompson gave business advice to filmmakers he was writing about, he was probably breaking even old norms.

Anyway, he wrote how busy he was in the pre-Christmas season, then said: “I have a couple of definite, however helpful, ideas about that excellent Chekhov short. No question it should be seen widely, which would mean a theatrical booking or circulation in the 16-millimeter field, which I know pretty well.”

He lamented the difficult business landscape faced by non-studio shorts, but gave the names of two top distributors — friends of his — who were successful at finding them audiences in commercial theaters, and at universities and other alternative venues. One contact he offered was a former silent film star named George K. Arthur [1899-1985]. I did a little research that suggested why Thompson believed Arthur would be a good bet, though this doesn’t appear in Thompson’s letter: Arthur had produced a short film called “The Bespoke Overcoat” [1956] which transposed [Nikolai] Gogol’s [1809-52] short story “The Overcoat” [1842] into a film about Russian Jewish immigrants struggling to survive in London’s East End.

It had won the short film Oscar for 1956. “Actually, ‘Harmfulness’ is right up his alley. . .,” Thompson writes, adding, “I’d take it as a favor if you mention my name.”

He also urges Strong to use his name with Leo Dratfield [1918-86], whose Contemporary Films went on to connect audiences to many of the leading artist-directors of the 20th-century. The “Leo Awards” [Leo Dratfield Award for Commitment and Excellence in Documentary] for exceptional short films were named for him.

“I hope my assumption is right that in view of Mr. Newman’s other activities you would be serving as emissary for the picture,” Thompson wrote to Strong. I was curious about Thompson, well-connected film journalist. His lengthy Times obituary described him as a tall, lanky man, with a soft Southern accent, who loved smoking nonfiltered cigarettes in his Greenwich Village apartment. On Thompson’s walls hung photographs of Marlon Brando and other stars. “I can’t imagine a better one than either of you fine actors,” he gushed to Strong in his letter, predicting that he and Newman might find “immediate action at one of these two places.”

So what happened? We don’t know. The Strong papers are silent. They don’t hint about what Strong did with Thompson’s help. Did he follow through? Maybe he did and the film was rejected. But Arthur and Dratfield were leading short film impresarios, focused on short films the way certain art galleries show only drawings, and the way smaller concert venues stick to chamber music. Didn’t they agree with Thompson’s appraisal that Strong and Newman had done an excellent job of distilling Chekhov with the power of a short film?

I wonder if a fear of alienating the studios might have stopped the two men from taking on the film. Or maybe market conditions discouraged even big guns of little films.

Whatever happened, Strong stopped seeking a public life for the film. He buried it in his clothes closet in the family apartment in Queens.

THE FIRST CLOSET

It’s a flat brown box, a narrow-sided square a bit larger than a vinyl record album. Worn black canvas straps, secured with metal clasps, grip it closed. On one corner, in an angular handwriting in black ink, someone has written the title: “On The Harmfullness [sic] of Tobacco.” On another corner, a white label bears the title again, above the printed letters: “Michael Strong.”

Strong’s children recall glancing into that closet as the 1960s progressed and seeing it. Paul said: “I knew he was proud of it, but he never talked about what happened with Newman.”

The year that Newman put their film in his hands, Strong got a big stroke of luck: Kazan invited him to join Jason Robards Jr. [1922-2000] and others in forming the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center. “He was very excited about it, “ Ellen Strong told me. In 1962, the arts center already being built at the current midtown site — an Acropolis of the arts — was international news. The headlines also spoke of construction delays. The elite group of actors made its first home in a hipper setting, a temporary theater built on West 4th Street, called the ANTA Washington Square Theatre.

In October that year, Strong gave a live performance of “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco” for a black-tie fundraiser in suburban New Jersey. In a letter to his son, he wrote of it as “my contribution to Lincoln Center.”

In the company’s inaugural season, 1963–64, he acted in two Arthur Miller premieres: “Incident at Vichy” [1964], about German round-ups of Jews in [un]occupied France, and “After the Fall” [1964] The New York Times’ Howard Taubman [1907-96] called “Vichy” (directed by Harold Clurman [1901-80]) “one of the most important plays of our time” [“Miller Drama Is Given by Repertory Group,” 4 Dec. 1964]. Strong played the dread-filled Jewish painter Lebeau, a quite-sizable role.

“After the Fall” (directed by Kazan) explored Miller’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe [they were married from 1956 to 1961], and was buzzed about wildly everywhere. The heady mixture of uptown prestige and downtown cool churned together with a “super family feeling,” recalled David Amram, who wrote incidental music for both Miller productions. He recalled the vibrant parties — including one where Ralph Meeker [1920-88] (an intense Actors Studio actor who was also Garfein’s male lead in “Something Wild”) turned out to be “a great jazz vibraphonist, and we jammed for hours.” Another night, Jason Robards took his fellow actors to an Irish bar, and led them in “hours of endless Irish songs.”

Kazan, the theater’s artistic director, has written of his affair at the time with an actress who became his wife [Barbara Loden, 1932-80, who played Maggie, the Monroe stand-in, in After the Fall; they were married from 1967 until her death from breast cancer]. Something like that happened with Michael Strong, who met Shalet, an actress-intern with the troupe, and left his wife to marry her. “He and Diane were in love, but it was also a fact that my mother wasn’t an actress,” said Ellen Strong, in a sad, reconciled tone. “My mother always said he worked hard, and admitted that he was very talented, even when she was mad at him, but Diane was 25 years younger than him and she idolized him.”

It was the 1960s — which means what? It was 1964, and I was 9, when my father suddenly put down his fork and knife at dinner and announced that the mother of one of my best friends had packed her bags and left her husband. This was a local news bomb like none before: A Jewish mother and wife of a Jewish father in my parents’ rather traditional suburban milieu had upped and left her husband, and my father stated her motivation: “For no better reason than that she wants a new life.”

My grandmother told me, “You can never understand someone else’s marriage, so don’t try.” In recounting Strong’s divorce, I won’t, but I repeat: It was the 1960s.

A lot was crazy in 1966, but the TV and film industries were booming. Strong and Shalet joined the exodus many New York actors were making to Los Angeles.

They lived in a small stucco house on Lloyd Place, a narrow street between Santa Monica and Sunset boulevards, in West Hollywood. The Strong divorce was wrenching for the family, and remnants of the pain are still palpable when talking to family members. But Strong’s children — and then, his grandchildren — visited him through the 1960s and ’70s. Ellen Strong stayed with the couple through the summers of her teens.

HIS WHOLE LIFE

Ellen Strong told me that her father brought the Newman film with him to L.A., and said she recalled seeing it in the closet of a small study where guests slept, surrounded by posters from Strong’s career.

Strong’s L.A. years saw plenty of good luck and dry spells. He was already 48 when he made his new start, relying on character roles — a featured male actor, as they call it — in several films. In “Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round” [1966], he belonged to a gang led by James Coburn’s [1928-2002] Eli Kotch that pulls off a heist at Los Angeles County Airport; and he played a sleazy used-car salesman in the thriller “Point Blank” [1966].

The Strong papers hold a carefully handwritten list of 57 parts he played for TV and film. I don’t know if it’s complete, but the TV roles it describes include “deputy attorney general,” “a clown,” “father of a sick child,” “an accountant (brother-in-law of Maureen Stapleton [1925-2006]),” a “rich salesman who gets taken,” a “homicidal psychiatrist,” and “a nice guy who is broke and steals.”

Going through the list, I thought of how often his characters — driving get-away cars or chasing them, taking or saving lives — must have flashed across my eyes when I was a teenager. “I’d watch him with friends when I was in college,” Ellen Strong, who is my age, told me. “Every time he was on, someone would turn to me and ask, ‘How is your father going to die this time?’”

He was on shows like “Hawaii Five-O” [CBS, 1968-80] “Mannix” [CBS, 1967-75] and “The Streets of San Francisco” [ABC, 1972-77], often with a taut urban feeling he’d sharpened on the New York stage. He played more genteel types on “Marcus Welby, M.D.” [ABC, 1969-76] and “Lou Grant” [CBS, 1977-82]. I noticed how often the list showed him as a Russian: “the Russian,” or “a Russian spy,” or once “a red (sic) Army man.” His most lasting trace as an actor may be with “Star Trek” fans, for his one-time part as Roger Korby, a power-hungry android [“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (The Original Series), 20 Oct. 1966].

“One of my main memories of him from those years was his always diving into a telephone booth to call his agent, worried about getting the next role,” Ellen Strong said. She also told me that he had “more and more problems finding work. He was getting older, and aging is the bane of an actor’s existence. It wasn’t easy sometimes. There was more time between jobs.”

He continued to act in live theater, and performed “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco” again in 1968, as the curtain raiser for another play. Finding the playbill for the one-evening job, I wondered if the audience saw a mirror to the febrile chaos of late-1960s America in Ivan Nyukhin’s barely functional madness.

In 1975, Strong appeared in the “The Dybbuk” [written 1913-16] at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum, an updated version of S. Ansky’s [1863-1920] drama of an exorcism in a Hasidic community.  [A dybbuk (pron. DIB-ook) in Jewish folklore is the spirit of a dead person; it has the power to possess the body of a living person on whom the dead person had some claim.]  Strong was connected to it in a personal way by being onstage with Jo “Skipper” Davidson [1903-81]. In the 1930s, Davidson was Strong’s professor in the theater department at Brooklyn College, and became known for his concern for individual students and for bringing Jewish theater and storytelling into their lives.

The program for “The Dybbuk” made a point of noting that Strong had studied with him[.] It was a family affair: Gordon Davidson [1933-2016], who just died, was Davidson’s son and ran the theater.

[This ends the middle section of Allan M. Jolan’s story of Paul Newman’s unreleased film adaptation of On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.  There are yet more surprises to come and I hope you’ll return for the third part of Jalon’s tale on Thursday, 11 February.]