‘Glass Menagerie’ the Way Williams Wrote It : Newman Directs Woodward in a Film That Acquires ‘a Life of Its Own’ : ‘Menagerie’ True to Tennessee

Although one clause of conventional wisdom says that opposites attract, there is a strong case to be made for common interests as the ties that really bind.

In their 30th year of marriage, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are as enthusiastic a model of togetherness as can be found. Both act, both direct, both love the stage and eloquent writing. They greatly admire each other’s work and they seem to bring out the best in each other.

If they weren’t so nonchalantly accepting about it all, they would invite skepticism, as if these were only public and not private roles. They stand in violation of what you would have to call the present norm, maritally speaking, in or out of show business.

Newman has just directed Woodward in a film of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” which opens in Los Angeles on Wednesday and which stars Karen Allen as her daughter, John Malkovich as her son and James Naughton as the Gentleman Caller.

Woodward strode into the Hotel Carlyle at teatime not long ago, pausing between a dentist’s appointment (numbing but not traumatic) and a night at the opera. (She and Newman are opera lovers.)

It is one of the quizzicalities of fame that, although she has been a star since she won the 1957 Oscar as best actress for “The Three Faces of Eve,” she is these days getting new smiles of recognition from passers-by--and a flowery compliment from the Carlyle waiter--because she has done an Audi commercial.

“It’s to help pay for the documentary I’m doing on the Group Theatre,” Woodward explains. “I drive an Audi anyway and I said what the heck it’s a good cause.” The Group Theatre was a predecessor to the Actors Studio, where she and Newman both studied, and as such it not only produced a generation of star actors, it profoundly affected the nature of American acting.

“I’m doing it for PBS and so far I’ve got 20 hours of film. I need to raise more money, but it’s not an easy thing to fund-raise for. That’s surprising, because without the Group the whole face of theater and film would be different.”

She has found a vocal recording of the Group Theatre’s 1937 production of “Golden Boy,” with Luther Adler, John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb and Frances Farmer. She directed a new production of “Golden Boy” at the Williamstown Summer Theater earlier this year and put together a three-hour tribute to the Group, which she filmed as part of the documentary. “I’ll have 25 hours of film, to cut to 90 minutes,” Woodward says. “Wish me luck.”

The production of “The Glass Menagerie” was first mounted at Williamstown, where Woodward is a regular. She, Allen and Naughton were in the cast, with the writer-director-actor John Sayles as the son (an alter ego for Williams himself in the autobiographical play).

It was such a success that it transfered to the Long Wharf in New Haven, with Treat Williams taking over from Sayles as the son.

“The film just started out to be an archive,” Newman said on the phone the other day. “I thought the performances were so terrific it would be shameful not to have them recorded permanently. But somewhere in the process the film acquired--I don’t know what the word is--a justification, a life of its own on its own account, a reason for being as a film.”

Newman had directed his wife in “Rachel, Rachel,” “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” and, for television, “The Shadow Box.” Woodward had played Laura, the daughter, in a stage production of “The Glass Menagerie” in Greenville, S.C., when she was 19 and beginning her career as an actress. She won a local award as best supporting actress. Until now, she had not done Williams on stage again.

“The Glass Menagerie” was done for television by Katharine Hepburn in 1973. It was filmed once before, 37 years ago, with Gertrude Lawrence, Jane Wyman, Arthur Kennedy and Kirk Douglas in the roles and Irving Rapper directing. The usually reliable Leslie Halliwell called it “one of its author’s lighter and more optimistic plays,” which is like calling “Hamlet” one of Shakespeare’s lighter and funnier works.

“It was much changed from the stage,” Woodward says, (although Williams shared screenplay credit with Peter Berneis). “We wanted to do it just the way Tennessee wrote it. We didn’t add a word.”

“We cut a total of, I think, 26 lines,” Newman says: “some interior monologues, and even Tennessee had complained about them. He said they were really there to facilitate scene changes and the intermission. But if anybody says, ‘Can I see the script?’ I say, ‘Just get the play and read it.”’

As an actress, Woodward says, “I don’t like doing things off the top of my head.” Although she was superb as a poet-professor being overwhelmed by Alzheimer’s disease in television’s “Do You Remember Love,” it was an unhappy experience.

“I realized how much I depend on rehearsal. It was very difficult. We had only a day or two around a table, and the writer (Vikki Patik) wasn’t there. The director doesn’t really have a chance to direct. It turned me off television and sent me back to the theater.”

She and Newman and the cast rehearsed for three weeks before they shot “The Glass Menagerie,” despite the long rehearsal, so to speak, which she and Allen and Naughton had had doing the stage runs. (Dustin Hoffman, taping “Death of a Salesman,” joked that the nearly 200 stage performances were about the right amount of rehearsal for the camera.)

With “Glass Menagerie,” there was the question of pulling the performances down to the intimacy of the camera. There was also, as always, the question of interpretation. “I was amazed how much my interpretation of Amanda was influenced by the actor who was playing my son. John Sayles was different from Treat, who was different from John Malkovich.”

The film is opened up only in that Malkovich’s monologues which bracket the action (the play is in a sense one long flashback) were shot outside a derelict tenement building, owned by the city of New York and infiltrated by the homeless, at 115th Street and 5th Avenue in Harlem, but making do for 1930s St. Louis. Everything else is inside the family’s melancholy apartment, created at the Astoria, Long Island, studio by Tony Walton.

The early rehearsals were tough going for Newman. “Where do you start? What scale are you looking for? I couldn’t seem to get a grip on what I ought to be doing. The first couple of days were really discouraging.”

He had a commitment to drive a race, so he left the actors to get on with it alone for three days. “Listen,” Newman says, “actors are best left alone anyway. Ninety-five per cent of the job is casting. I’d seen Joanne, and Karen and Naughton in the production, of course, and John (Malkovich), well, John has access to a magnificent emotional instrument.

“As I say, it started out just to be a record. Then in the process of work, it began to seem a grandiose idea, then it began to be a challenge--devising a way to create memory on film. Keep it simple; the bones are there; they’re enough.

“I’m not one of the auteur group,” Newman says. “I really believe it’s a communal thing.” He gives high marks to Walton, who designed the production, and to Michael Ballhaus, who was the cinematographer on many of R. M. Fassbinder’s films in Germany and more recently on “The Color of Money.”

“The camera is always eavesdropping,” says Newman.

Woodward, in addition to directing at Williamstown and finishing her documentary, is teaching a group of some 27 young actors and actresses in New York. “They’re all having hard times getting work. But when was it much different? But we’re having a great time. My teacher, Sandy Meisner, used say, ‘It’s a play, so PLAY!’ I firmly believe in that.

“Children are very truthful when they play. They’re uninhibited; they have no fear. Acting is being foolish. I like to see people having fun. Part of what I do is a singing class. So everybody SINGS. If you can stand up and sing, you can do anything.

“At Williamstown we have a cabaret every night. I made my debut singing, ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy.’ Loved it.”

The Newmans await the reactions to “The Glass Menagerie.” Meanwhile, for Newman (except for the racing, the salad dressing et al for good causes, the anti-nuclear advocacy), what’s new? Meanwhile nothing, he says with mock disgust. “Not a g.d. thing.

“It’s dry out there the likes of which I can’t remember. Redford and I were just talking. It’s a highly unusual time. D’you know, he and George Roy Hill and I have been trying to find another property to do ever since ‘The Sting’! Haven’t been able to find one.

“Actually we’ve finally got a sensational property. Whether it’ll translate or not we don’t know. Too early to talk about it anyway.”