Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

January 26, 1925– Paul Newman:

“I picture my epitaph: ‘Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown’.”

I have earned the ire of a lot of people by finding the gay angle when writing about fascinating figures. There are plenty of anecdotes to be found about alleged bisexual trysts between Newman and the usual suspects: James Dean, Sal Mineo, Tennessee Williams, even Steve McQueen. Who knows for certain?

Famously, when asked once if he was ever tempted to be unfaithful to his wife, Joanne Woodward, Newman replied:

“Why go out for hamburger when you’ve got steak at home?”

Joan Crawford, who had several liaisons with Newman during his first marriage, dismissed that remark, saying:

“What a clever thing to say, but how true is it? First, I think Woodward is hamburger, not steak. As for Paul, he dines out frequently and on the most succulent filet mignon, from what I hear.”

Several of his friends and associates have claimed to have known that Newman was bisexual, including Eartha Kitt, and Janice Rule, who played opposite Newman in the Broadway version of Picnic (1953). Shelley Winters claimed to have had a threesome with Newman and Marlon Brando.

One of Newman’s best performances is in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958), where he plays Brick, a repressed gay guy. James Dean had been originally cast in the role, but he died in that famous car crash before production began. In the film version, all the direct gay references were removed from the Tennessee Williams’ script to satisfy the production codes. Richard Brook’s screenplay dances around the real reasons Brick and Cat (Elizabeth Taylor) haven’t had sex in years, but dialogue about the suicide of Brick’s especially close football buddy Skipper remained.

Newman told Tennessee Williams:

“The role of Brick is perfect for me. All my life I’ve been split into two different directions. One side of me wants to live life with my gay football buddy Skipper, the other side is tempted to fuck the living shit out of Maggie the Cat and be the heterosexual stud most of my fans want me to be.”

The Left Handed Gun (1958), features Newman as outlaw Billy The Kid. Written by Gore Vidal, a close friend of Newman and Woodward (the three of them shared a house for years), the screenplay depicted Billy as gay. But, in Arthur Penn’s final version, Billy’s relationship with his murdered mentor is left ambiguous.

In 1959, he returned to Broadway, and Tennessee Williams, in Sweet Bird Of Youth. After that, Newman abandoned the theatre for 33 years, to the dismay of Woodward, who believed that stage discipline would make him less reliant on his special charm and the mannerisms that were, for some critics, becoming too reliable.

Newman’s own contradictory character makes his movie star persona seem superficial. He was a skilled, serious actor, but he was also one of the most beautiful men to appear on screen.

He was a producer, film and stage director, a race car driver, a political activist and a philanthropist. He contributed more money to charities, in relation to his own wealth, than any other American in the 20th century.

Newman said that he was happiest behind the wheel of a racing car.

As a producer and co-founder of a production company, he was responsible for many of his own films and he directed six films, four of them starring his wife, Joanne Woodward. One of them brought him an Oscar nomination, just one of nine during his long career.

In 1982, he founded, initially as a modest venture, Newman’s Own, a company that makes products like salad dressing, pasta sauces and popcorn based on his own home recipes. Newman’s Own now makes over 50 products. Newman devoted the company’s entire profits to causes throughout the world. They have raised more than $400 million, so far.

Newman was actively involved in the project that received funding through Newman’s Own, including the Hole In The Wall Gang summer camps, that he started for underprivileged kids. In 1999, he returned to the theatre in the two-character play Love Letters, opposite Woodward. The play raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for land conservation in Connecticut where the couple lived.

Newman was never shy about his politics. He donated one million dollars to the leftist magazine The Nation; he had a long-term involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. He narrated the documentary King: A Filmed Record (1970), about Martin Luther King Jr. He campaigned against the war in Vietnam and supported Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential campaign. He was vigorous in his opposition to Richard Nixon and was proud of being among the Top 20 on Nixon’s enemy list.

Newman was an early supporter of Gay Rights:

“I’m a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter, either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community.”

But, mostly we remember him for his screen career. He made more than 50 features, 11 opposite Woodward. With those blue eyes, insouciant smile, and always slim, athletic body, he was simply all that.

In “Exodus”, 1960, via YouTube

From 1943 to 1946 Newman served in the US Navy. After WW II, he attended Kenyon College and then Yale Drama School. He planned to be a theatre teacher, but he was spotted at Yale by NYC agents, moved to Manhattan and took classes The Actors Studio. He made a successful Broadway debut, originally as an understudy, in William Inge’s play Picnic where he met another understudy, Woodward. They fell in love, although Newman was married and had a young son.

In 1954, he had famously lost out to James Dean when director Elia Kazan screen-tested them both for the lead in East Of Eden. But in 1956, after Dean’s death, the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano, already planned for Dean, in Somebody Up There Likes Me went to him. The next year, Newman filmed The Long Hot Summer (1958), from a William Faulkner story, opposite Woodward. Newman divorced his first wife, and married his co-star.

Newman worked with the best directors, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, John Huston and Robert Altman, but often in their less interesting films. There was Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961) with Newman in his most complex early role and a turning point in his career. He played Fast Eddie, a pool shark, and his performance cemented his screen persona, a mix of vulnerability and swagger. He was nominated for an Academy Award, but lost. He played fast Eddie again 25 years later, opposite Tom Cruise, in The Color Of Money, winning his only acting Oscar.

There were more great performances: Hud (1963), Harper (1966), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969) with his friend Robert Redford. In the decade of the 1960s, he starred in 18 films, as well as directing his first and best film, Rachel, Rachel (1968), starring Woodward.

He was best playing against type: Hud is selfish, Luke arrogant, Harper cynical and Butch was a killer.

In 1969, at the height of his fame, Newman formed First Artists Productions with Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier, Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Each agreed to make three films, but only Newman fulfilled his obligation.

I thought he became especially handsome in middle-age, and my own favorite Newman performances are from this era: the washed-up detective The Drowning Pool (1976), a working-class guy in Absence Of Malice (1981), and a fading, alcoholic lawyer in The Verdict (1982), a role director Sidney Lumet remarked, required only minimal research.

Via YouTube

His intense performance in The Verdict failed to get him an Oscar, a fact taken harder by his wife than by Newman. It was said that his politics and East Coast-ness alienated him from the Hollywood establishment. He took the next year off to concentrate on his race cars, but then he was awarded an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement as a 60-year-old, an award usually given to the elderly in the industry. The following year, he skipped the Oscars only to win Best Actor for The Color Of Money. He received the Academy’s Jean Herscholt Award for his philanthropic work in 1993.

Newman seemed to have retired from acting, but in 1994, he took a supporting role as a bad guy in the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy and the lead in Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool, one of his best roles. It brought him another Oscar nomination

In 1995, when he was 70-years-old, he entered the 24-Hour Daytona Endurance Race, the oldest person ever to complete the event.

When he was 73-years-old, he played an old private eye with a drinking problem in Twilight (1998), giving a deep, melancholy performance, and at 77-years-old he took a juicy supporting role as a vicious mobster in Sam Mendes’ Road To Perdition (2002). It brought Newman another Oscar nomination and rave reviews. The same year he returned to Broadway as the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Still handsome, still strong, Newman’s final appearance was in the television drama Empire Falls (2005). He won an Emmy Award at 80-years-old. Newman is one of only four actors to have been nominated for an Academy Award in five different decades. His final credits rolled in 2008, taken by lung cancer at 83-years-old.

By the way, I collect pictures of him. They are wonderful to look at.

Via Youtube

Via YouTube

1963, via YouTube

“Maybe the best part about aging is that your liver can’t handle those beers at noon anymore.”

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He’s spilling ALLLL the T!

We’re so excited to let you know that none other than Chris Crocker has a new series on WOW Presents Plus! He’s spilling allllllllllllll the T while drinking tea on Sip with Chris!

Every episode will cover a different topic and the first episode, which went live yesterday, is all about… Britney Spears. Why? Why NOT!

While spilling the T, Chris talks everything from whether he has met Britney yet (he hasn’t yet!) to what he would say to people who think she can’t sing.

You can watch the teaser below, but if you want to get the full experience, sign up for your 30 day FREE trial of WOW Presents Plus right now!

January 28, 1873– Colette:

“Do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm”.

Her name was Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette Gauthier-Villars de Jouvanel Goudeket, but smartly, she went simply by “Colette”.

Colette put herself out to the world as an ingénue, an innocent young wife of the Paris belle époque, a scandalous lesbian, a risqué music-hall performer, a serious novelist of prodigious output, a theatre critic, a beautician, and a world-class seducer of both sexes.

Her writing is playful, teasing, and sexually suggestive. She is an elegant stylist, perceptive and shrewd.

Colette’s 50 novels and collections of short stories were popular with housewives, shop girls and intellectuals. Her writing emphasis was on women’s obstacles in love and she lived as passionately as she wrote. Sex was front and center in her writing, embellished with a spicy style and sparkling dialogue. She wrote about love, licit and illicit.

When Colette was 6-years-old, her politician father permitted her to try to match him, wine glass for wine glass, while he stumped to local bars looking for votes. Her free-thinking mother taught her the importance of being a female, and she shocked the neighbors by refusing to wear mourning clothes when her husband died.

When Colette was 20-years-old, she fell in love with the writer Henri Gauthier-Villars who took her from her village in Burgundy to Paris to be his wife. He was a popular writer of pulp novels under the pen-name Willy, and was famous around Paris for being a cad.

He encouraged Colette to write down stories about her childhood. He liked what he read and after some suggestions, he sent them off to an editor under his own name. The resulting series of Claudine novels made Gauthier-Villars rich and famous. He would lock Colette in a room until she turned out more stories. He was a vile, ruthless man. When Colette became ill and nearly died during their first year of marriage, Gauthier-Villars simply began a long string of affairs. He forced Colette to acknowledge his mistresses and to entertain them in their home. After 13 years, Colette had enough and she divorced him.

She continued writing books, but under her own name, but she had less success and had to find other ways of making a living.

Colette became a music-hall dancer, which gave her new material for books. She worked as a theatre critic, political writer, fashion critic and she wrote a cooking column. She published her first novel, Dialogues De Betes, under her own name. It sold well and received good reviews. Colette began to explore the depths and direction of her own sexual identity. But, with Chéri (1920), Colette wrote about a character entirely different from herself. She adapted Chéri for the stage and played the leading role herself.

1907, via Wikimedia Commons

Portraying messy sexual boundaries on stage gave Colette the perfect opportunity to explore her own feelings. Performing as a dancer gave her the chance to meet new people in an exciting new venue while providing her an opportunity to earn a living, not easy for a divorced woman in late 19th century Paris.

“Solitude, freedom, my pleasant and painful work as mime and dancer, tired and happy muscles, and, by way of a change from all that, the new anxiety about earning my meals, my clothes, and my rent, such, all of a sudden, was my lot. But with it too went a savage defiance, a disgust for the milieu where I had lived and suffered, a stupid fear of man, of men, and of women too.”

Colette’s career in the theatre gave her the freedom to act on her own vexing fantasies. Working as a performer on stage provided her with the opportunity to explore her voracious sexual appetite, and Colette did just that.

In a performance at the famed Moulin Rouge, Colette caused a near riot by miming sex acts on stage. She had affairs with other women. One of her lovers was Emperor Napoleon III’s niece, Mathilde De Morny. Colette moved into De Morny’s château. After a brief, unhappy marriage, De Morny became the Marquise de Belboeuf, although she was better known in Paris lesbian circles as “Monsieur Belboeuf”.

De Morny supported Colette with money and introduced her to the high society crowd. She also showed Colette the gay underground of drag queens, beautiful men and cross-dressing women. Colette gave De Morny love, affection, and plenty of sex. She also gave De Mornay a role in her act at the Moulin Rouge, with Colette playing an Egyptian mummy who unwrapped her bandages and boldly made love to De Mornay who played the role of a male archaeologist. The act was banned by the censors.

Colette loved the publicity. It also set the pattern for her next decade, performing and writing, and revealing her gayness.

In the 1930s, Colette was a success and widely regarded as the greatest writer in France. She became the first woman admitted to the prestigious Goncourt Academy.

In 1935, Colette married again. Her new husband was a jewelry salesman who had lost his business during the Great Depression. He was Jewish, and the anti-Semitic attitudes of the era made it difficult for him to find work. Colette supported him financially and helped hide him during the Nazi occupation of Paris during WW II.

Throughout the war years, Colette continued writing. She published her most famous novel, Gigi (1945) when she was 72-years-old. Three years later, the novel was adapted into a French film. In 1951, it was adapted for the Amercian stage by Anita Loos, and was produced on Broadway starring Audrey Hepburn, who was selected personally by Colette for the role. In 1958, it was remade as a musical film by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture. I seem to be alone in this opinion, but am not a big fan of this film. The story of a child being groomed to be a prostitute makes me a bit uneasy and the score sounds like the cast-offs from My Fair Lady. I much prefer the excellent film version of Chéri (2009), directed by Stephen Frears, and starring Michelle Pfeiffer.

Colette was a lifelong passionate lover of animals of all kinds, but especially cats. Felines figure in many of her stories and her novel Dialogue Des Betes is presented as conversation between a cat and a dog. It is sweet and insightful. Le Chatte (1932) is a curious story about a love triangle between a man, a woman and, obviously, a cat.

Sadly, Colette never saw the musical that is sort of her legacy. She left this world in 1954. She was given an official French State Funeral, highly unusual for a woman at that time. Thousands of fans attended the service.

Colette was never admitted to the Academie Francaise… because it is for men only.

10) Sundance ‘18 – RBG & Seeing Allred

Fenton LOVED the documentaries RBG – about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and heading to CNN – and Seeing Allred which is about Gloria Allred and premieres February 9 on Netflix.

9) Marvel’s Runaways on Hulu

James just got Hulu! So he’s binging Runaways, and absolutely loves it! Check out the trailer:

8) Morgan McMichaels on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 3

We discuss Morgan McMichaels, RuPaul’s All Stars 3, and the phenomenon the show has become since Morgan was last on it back in season 2!

7) Sundance ’18 – Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Fenton had the chance to see the very rarely shown Todd Haynes film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story while at Sundance. Hear what he thought of it!

6) My! My! My! Look at Troye Sivan NOW!

After seeing Troye Sivan on SNL recently and finding out his hot new tunes are written by WOWlebrity Leland, we’re in LOVE with this gay teen pop sensation!

5) Two’s Company: Suzanne Somers & Trump

Find out what we thought about has-been Suzanne Somers proclaiming her love for Trump to TMZ.

4) Sundance ’18 – Westwood & Chef Flynn

Fenton fills us in on two more MUST-SEE documentaries shown at Sundance – Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist & Chef Flynn about “the Justin Bieber of food” Flynn McGarry.

3) Netflix Pick: The New Monolo Blahnik Doc

It wouldn’t be a show without James St. James talking about something he watched on Netflix, right? This week it was Manola: The Boy Who Made Shoes For Lizards.

2) Electric Avenue: Chevrolet Bolt vs Tesla Model 3

Tom may be in the market for a new car. Should he go with the underdog – the affordable Chevrolet Bolt? Or be sexy and flashy in the new Tesla Model 3 – which he’ll have to wait over a year for? Or should he just walk?

1) Oscar Nominations: Who Got Snubbed?

Did you favorite film of the year get nominated? Did it get snubbed?

Resistor of the Week – Women’s Marchers

He’s spilling ALLLL the T!

Don’t worry, there will be a brand new episode next week, hennies!

While you’re waiting, watch all the other awesome content we have on WOW Presents Plus!

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**9) Marvel’s Runaways on Hulu**