The Lesser Known Side of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Stories | culture

The starting price was $1 million; It finally sold for $15.5 million, the highest price reached so far (2017) for a wristwatch at auction. It belongs to Paul Newman, given to him by his wife, Joanne Woodward, with the inscription “Drive with care”. More than just a watch, it was an icon, it’s as close as a mere mortal can get to a couple’s incorruptible love with the best photo album in history.

Documentary series Recent movie stars (HBO) dedicates six one-hour chapters to telling the true story of the world’s most handsome man and gorgeous actress with whom he has shared more than half a century. Through unpublished material, more than a hundred interviews with spouses, friends and colleagues – which Newman intended to use to write his memoirs – as well as conversations with their children and grandchildren, director Ethan Hawke He achieves a very difficult feat: amplifying the legend. He did so by bringing them down to earth, showing that their relationship wasn’t perfect (because there is no relationship at all) and humanizing the latter stars – as their friend, writer Gore Vidal, used to call them.

a star crook They burned the tapes, but the copies remained. It was the family that requested the documentary; Their daughter Melissa stated that although they were both seen as the perfect marriage, their story had to be disentangled in order for them to get more of the credit they deserve. And it is precisely the originality, the basic characteristic of all good actors, that adds to its merit.

They met in 1953 in their agent’s office, and after a rapidly changing negative first impression, lust took hold everywhere: hotels, motels, public parks, restrooms, rental cars, swimming pools, and beaches. The relationship lasted for five years, until Newman divorced his wife, Jackie Waite, with whom he had three children under the age of five.

They married in 1958 and had three children. While Newman’s fame took off, Woodward’s career – now a mother to a large family – took its toll. She admitted in the documentary that although she loved them, if she had the opportunity to do it again, she might not have chosen to have children. However, their daughter Melissa says she is the one who made them all a family.

The marriage then followed an unfair, albeit universal, script: as I grew older and took care of the children, it progressed and became more and more interesting. What does marriage to Paul Newman look like? This is what the interviewees wanted to know. One day, the presenter addressed the audience in front of the actor, and asked: “Would you let him leave the house if you were his wife?” At that time, he uttered a phrase that appeared in the history of romance: “I have steak at home. Why should I go out for a hamburger?” She did not like it at all. “What a chauvinistic statement,” she says in the documentary (voice of Laura Linney). “I am not a piece of meat in the face of God. Every time this quote appears, I want to be killed.”

They also overcame the tragic death of Scott, Newman’s eldest son, from an overdose, at age 28, as well as the actor’s alcohol addiction. Finding him on the floor one day with a wound to his forehead, Woodward took the girls, left the house, and gave him an ultimatum: Either it was alcohol or they were. Finally, they came to an agreement – only beer.

The most handsome man in the world was surprisingly insecure, and didn’t talk much about himself throughout the documentary (voiced by George Clooney). Woodward had not only “created” him as a sex symbol; It also taught him to love himself.

In 1983, on their 25th anniversary, after much trouble, they renewed their vows and married again. The text they both read reads: “Happiness in marriage is not something that just happens. A good marriage must be created. It cultivates patience and the ability to forgive and forget. It stands together in the face of the world.”

In 2007, Woodward was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Nine days later, Newman was diagnosed with cancer. Before he went to the hospital for the last time, he put his compass inside his wife’s Christmas sock, so she could have a gift for the first holidays they wouldn’t spend together in 50 years. At that moment he had already burned the corresponding tapes. Paul Newman is tired of Paul Newman. Fortunately, his friend, screenwriter Stuart Stern, had already written it all.

scandal story

If the Newman Woodward story was about perfect love (even if it started in adultery), then the story of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton was about scandal.

They met when he was 28 and she was 20. “She was so beautiful that I almost laughed out loud. She was absolutely gorgeous. She was, in short, too bloody, and not only that, she was completely ignoring me,” he would say. When he was first flirting with her, she refused to become just a “notch on his belt.”

They didn’t see each other again until nine years later, in Cleopatra. By that time she had already been married four times: to Conrad Nicky Hilton Jr. (the heir to the hotel chain) at the age of 18; to English actor Michael Wilding, age 20; to producer Mike Todd at age 25 (he died a few months later when his plane crashed, called Lucky Liz) and to Eddie Fisher (Todd’s best friend, who was married to Debbie Reynolds, one of Taylor’s best friends) at age 26. Screenwriter Mario Barra, author Romance D Cinema (Romantic film), explains that the press began accusing the actress of being a “house destroyer”.

Sparks flew over the group. Although they were married to other people, Taylor and Burton never left each other. Barra recalls that the Vatican condemned the couple, accusing them of “sexual vagrancy,” and Fox attempted to sue them for damages, claiming that the extramarital affair and all the bad publicity it brought had had a negative effect on the film, regardless of the fact that Cleopatra It ended up becoming the highest-grossing film of 1963. ″

They married in 1964, after two divorces with big money. Burton gave her an emerald and diamond necklace worth $150,000. After the initial controversy, the press fell in love with the explosive couple. Then Burton began drinking – up to four bottles a day – and in 1973 they divorced. In the summer of 1975, they met in Switzerland with their lovers to settle a divorce, but instead decided to marry again. They lasted less than a year. He married another woman and married her seventh husband, John Warner A Republican Senator “I soon got bored,” Barra says. In 1982, Taylor interrupted a play by Burton when he went up on stage to whisper to him in Welsh “I love you”. The applause of the audience was thunderous. Actor Gabriel Byrne called it the most memorable theatrical moment he had ever seen on stage. But it didn’t work. At one point, Burton fled to Las Vegas with one of his young lieutenants. Taylor walked into the detox clinic.

At the end of the summer of 1984, he said goodbye to her by phone. She was 58 years old. His widow prevented Taylor from attending the funeral. I respected her decision and waited for the tomb visit. A few days later she received a letter that the actor sent her before her death. They never stopped writing to each other, not even when they were married to other people.

As Joanne Woodward said, “No one understands anyone else’s relationships. Only the two people involved know what binds that relationship together.” The two lovers lasted a lifetime, each in their own way.