The living room of my childhood home in Virginia was like a stage: longer than it was wide, flanked by a massive picture window that looked out onto an unseen audience. As a night owl from early adolescence, I paced that stage for what still seems like multiple lifetimes, while the dying vacuum-tube TV at one end flickered music videos and late-night movies.
It’s lucky we never updated the carpeting – 70s shag was the only thing that could withstand that amount of protracted strain. With my daydreaming came inspiration, ideas for the stories I knew I would go on to tell someday. Back then, I never worried about when or how I would complete them. I possessed the greatest luxury I’ve ever had – time.
Now, in my thirties and single, time has begun to diffuse without wedding days, childbirth, or standing ovations to give shape to a lifetime. Perhaps this led to a recent obsession with determining what could be calculated as my happiest day.
The question is an exercise in futility, of course. But despite the poor methodology, I finally settled on one June night shortly after high school graduation, the world perched uneasily underneath me. But at that age, precipices still feel like thresholds.
I’ve tried to remember all the details, but in doing so have worn and creased the memory so that it no longer has anything fresh to offer. I’d gotten home tired and sun-starched, probably another final senior get-together to rattle off our hope-filled farewells.
There was cake in the fridge. My mother’s rough-weave ‘80s sofa scratched my freshly showered bare legs. I missed the intro, so I didn’t know the movie was The Long, Hot Summer. It’s a ‘50s Southern pastiche, all lemonade on the wraparound porch (not one but two wraparound porches to be exact), double entendre, and spinning fans.
This early Paul Newman film isn’t an acclaimed classic for a reason. Only Atlanta-native Joanne Woodward has a plausible Southern accent and Orson Welles’ is nearly unintelligible, a mouth full of scenery and precarious prosthetic nose. But while a gallery of cicadas screamed outside the picture window, summer and youth slipped into their brief but perfect lock step. And so the film will always be imbued for me with the excitement of early summer nights, and therefore always carry the same promises they make and rarely fulfill.
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The Long, Hot Summer is mostly forgotten – among 1950s films, southern films, and Paul Newman films. What footnote the 1958 movie does have is being the first onscreen partnership of Paul Newman and Joanna Woodward. This movie, so says silver screen lore, was where they met and fell in love that previous September in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Ninety-six minutes of the formation of one of Hollywood’s most legendary, and certainly most enduring, romances.
(And lore it was. They’d been having an affair for four years, while Newman was still married to his first wife, the mother of his three children. When Newman finally obtained a divorce after shooting for The Long, Hot Summer wrapped, Woodward was already several weeks pregnant.)
I didn’t know who Paul Newman was while watching that early summer night, but I sure as hell knew I liked what I saw. The film is a saturated Technicolor oil painting, giving all the actors’ teeth and sweat a glittering brilliance, and takes Newman’s infamous eyes past piercing and into an inhuman incandescence. He and Woodward escape the curse of so many other actor couples and have striking onscreen chemistry. What results is sexual, simmering, melodramatic, and chromatic.
The Long, Hot Summer was advertised as William Faulkner’s steamy soap opera, an unsettled medley of three of his works: the short story “Barn Burning,” the novella Spotted Horses, and the novel The Hamlet. But the movie so barely resembles any of these three stories that when I was assigned to write an essay on “Barn Burning” as an English undergrad, I was halfway through the paper before I realized this story had inspired part of the movie I so loved.
In the film, accused barn burner and conman Ben Quick swaggers into the small Mississippi town of Frenchman’s Bend with a cockeyed hat and glistening tan, then deftly insinuates himself into its richest and most powerful family, the Varners. The notable holdout is patriarch Will Varner’s contemptuous daughter, Clara, played by Woodward – unmarried, to her father’s relentless consternation.
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The way we perceive art is dependent not just on our background, but our foreground. Specifically, just how much of it lies ahead of us, as anyone who has re-read a beloved book from childhood can tell you, often with disappointment and an alienation from this stranger we once were. I have no interest in re-reading On the Road, confident I will find far less inspiration in it than I did as a newly minted sixteen-year-old.
On the cusp of adulthood, movies and novels and songs are glimpses of guarantees, not consolations. During my first viewing of The Long, Hot Summer, my whole body sang with assumed opportunities, an unquestioned entitlement to adventures, romance, and excitement.
I didn’t reflect then on how many others older than me had somehow been overlooked for their own epic adventures and romances. I likely figured they had obviously not wanted them enough, surely not as much as I did, their souls not attuned to that cosmic radio signal.
When we’re young, we are still the exceptions.
***
I was born nearly thirty years after The Long, Hot Summer was made, but I know there is plenty churning underneath the CinemaScopic surface, painted over by apocalyptic skies and expansive green horizons. The greatest disservice the film does to its inspirational author is to ignore the social issues Faulkner was willing to face twenty-five years earlier.
At the time I didn’t think much about the whitewashing of history, especially considering the way I rewrote and repackaged my own. A young white woman growing up below the Mason-Dixon line, I believed ignoring problems was mostly harmless, sometimes even necessary.
The Long, Hot Summer was billed as a “story of the modern South,” but only a circumscribed slice of the mid-century South. Not a story of the working class or poor, and most certainly not of anyone who wasn’t white. Black actors have a grand total of 14 lines in the film, and the majority of those are uttered by the white-jacketed butler Lucius, played by Bill Walker. The WWI veteran and son of a formerly enslaved man is given much less to do here than in his most famous role as Reverend Sykes in To Kill a Mockingbird, and Walker must do it in an Amos’n’Andy-style patter.
Only five years before the March on Washington (which Newman and Woodward both attended), there isn’t a whisper of discontent among the crowd of laughing Black residents who loiter in front of Varner’s general store or are dispatched to eagerly deliver messages to the white characters.
***
During those early stages of the pandemic, while others were baking bread and buying overpriced farmhouses, I instead unearthed a renewed interest in a twelve-years-dead Hollywood legend. In need of some internal compass of ambition, I began to channel the wildly successful Paul Newman and his acclaimed work ethic, sorting my own days around what he would have done with every hour presently ticking by me.
There was a Sisyphean stupidity to this. Newman was born in 1925 to upper-middle class parents in the idyllic half-timbered Tudor Revival suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. A football player at Kenyon College after a tour as a gunner in the Navy, he moved on to a sampling of Yale Drama School and the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, before being wooed to Hollywood by ardent agents. He’d receive his first Oscar nomination fewer than five years after the move.
Even the fires that made his generation the greatest one only seemed to further forge the strength of Paul Newman’s luck. His father’s sporting goods store managed to weather the Depression, even flourish, as so many others were shuttered. During World War II, the future star and his squadron were grounded when their aircraft’s pilot developed an earache. The squadron sent in their stead was obliterated by a kamikaze attack.
At one point in the 2022 HBO documentary The Last Movie Stars (based on thousands of hours of tapes Newman recorded of himself, Woodward, and others), Joanne Woodward states rather cryptically “luck is an art,” reflecting perhaps on her acting career, perhaps on the amount of timing and happenstance required for any long-term marriage, even among the most committed partners.
She and her husband weathered the same struggles as anyone who perseveres through a sixty-year marriage. Newman reportedly cheated at least once. As a married mother and stepmother of six, Woodward watched her rising star languish. Newman’s only son, Scott, died of a drug overdose at the age of 28, exacerbating Newman’s own alcoholism.
At one point Woodward wouldn’t let Newman back in the house, only relenting when he announced he had “nowhere else to go.” Somehow the respective rhythms of their lives brought them back in syncopation. There is luck again. This time not as a many splendored thing, but a tempestuous mistress.
In the 2022 book The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: a Memoir, also based on all those tapes Newman recorded, this exemplar of serendipity is often sullen and cynical, his stories told with the irritability of an old man. Which of course he was. However, he was also Paul Newman.
One of the rawest revelations in the HBO documentary is not Newman’s, but Woodward’s. She confesses her doubts that actors should really become parents, and that while she loves her children, she isn’t sure she would do it again if she had the choice.
Now that I’m in my 30s, the inescapability of disappointment is no longer an empty recitation, but an understanding. Potential can contort into a betrayal. We may have life by a string at some point, but the string will break in a thousand different ways. Our subsequent lives, no matter how fulfilling, fray and knot back together in ways we never envisioned.
***
So much was to happen to Newman and Woodward just after filming: a Las Vegas wedding, a miscarriage, awards, stardom. Did they have any inkling of it while on set in those waning September days of summer, students returned to school and adults back to work from vacations? Or, when you’re two of the last movie stars in the moment of ascent, does the string you hold life by demand an undistracted gaze?
Part of the power of youth’s potential is the overhanging threat that it can ripen into a specter that haunts us. Permanency and potential are not bedfellows. Did I sense this in some way at eighteen, and that made the high all that more of a ride? Probably not. Most of us don’t. We would never have the world on a string if we knew when and how the string would break.
We instead learn to grasp at the happiness we can find in the everyday as gracefully as we can, submitting ourselves to luck’s inscrutable logic. But no matter how old, there is always a seed of truth in our departed dreams.
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Mac Carey is a writer from Virginia. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Texas Monthly, Washingtonian, and Wilderness House Literary Review. You can see more of her work at maccarey.net.
© 2024, Mac Carey
Halfway Down the Stairs 