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Blogs by Robert A. Mills
NEW YORK, NEW YORK PART IV (continued) 11/6/2009 1:26:06 PM
During the halcyon days of local television, there was one assignment I particularly looked forward to: co-host and announcer on Pat Sumberg’s afternoon show, “Welcome Inn.” This was a half hour program on which we interviewed visiting celebrities under the guise of operating a resort-type lodge a la Bob Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette—we were sort of a prehistoric Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa with exotic banter, eons before its time, that was regrettably wasted on a management that didn’t understand us and an audience that hadn’t a clue what we were about.
One day our guest was Jim Kriegsmann, the New York “Photographer to the Stars,” in Rochester for a meeting with Eastman executives back when Kodak was a film manufacturer and imaging dynasty to be reckoned with. He was a delightful guest who told titillating stories about the celebrities he worked with—“shot,” actually (I got a lot of mileage out of that!)—and afterwards Pat and I took him for drinks at our favorite watering hole, The Eggleston, just down the street from the studio.
“If either of you,” he said, “get to the City, be sure and let me know. We’ll set up a session for some headshots—-on the house.”
“On the house”—-the magic words. Naturally, I called him a few weeks later and said I was on my way; the assignment to interview Sammy Davis, Jr. could not have come at a better time.
James J. Kriegsmann’s studio on Broadway was not as large as I had expected. In fact, it was tiny compared to our “Welcome Inn” set, but then, what did he need, really, but a few Klieg lights and flash umbrellas with some backcloths and paper rolls, and a couple stools and low balustrades for his subjects to lean on? Kriegsmann’s genius was in his exposures, his lighting, the cameras he used and the film plates that could capture the essence of a performer’s inner self in such a way that the ordinary became an art form. Very few could do this; Kriegmann’s narrow corridors were adorned with one masterpiece after another: Brando, Burton, Carney, Gleason, Caesar, Allen, Downs, Carson, Goulet, Giegud, Olivier, Andrews, Ball, Garroway, Winchell, Kerr, Lawrence, Coward, et al. . . . Even to an untrained eye such as mine, it was obvious why he was in such demand.
He took only half a dozen shots of me, portraits, close up and personal, and he said, “I’m glad you didn’t wear a shirt and tie. The polo with the open collar is perfect. I bet you a hundred dollars you never appear on TV without a tie—-right?” I told him the only tie I brought with me got ruined in the elevator incident. “What’re you going to wear for the Sammy Davis thing?” I told him, this polo, probably. “Perfect!” he said. “Don’t ever let yourself look like something you aren’t. You want to be a network weasel, dress like one. Want to be a star, wear what you want. Guys like me’ll make you look like what you are!”
While we were talking, a young man came in and Kriegsmann jumped up and said, “Ah, there you are! I thought you’d gotten lost! Say hello to Bob Mills, from Rochester. Robert, this skinny runt is Paul Newman. He’s in some Bill Inge play everybody wants to see.”
I had never heard of Paul Newman back then and didn’t know him from any other aspiring actor on Broadway, but I admit there was something charismatic, something different and unusual about him—not so much his appearance: no question he was handsome in a boyish, bookish way, his eyes a radiant blue and his smile genuine and unforced—it was the way he moved when he approached you, his hand extended but his arm bent at the elbow, as if wanting to meet you and be your friend, but shyly holding back for fear you might not like him. I was certain he might brush my own hand aside and embrace me in a bear hug.
Years later, when he’d become a Super Star and national icon, he and his wife of decades, Joanne Woodward, planning retirement, bought a house near me in Roswell, Georgia. Not that we were ever neighbors-—Joanne and he lived in a gated mansion and I in an ordinary subdivision a few blocks and a million light-years away—-but I often ran into him in Home Depot or Publix. I always remembered to laugh in the right places when he told me more than once how Ralph Meeker had originally beaten him out of the lead in "Picnic." He said the director Josh Logan thought he, Newman, was too small and skinny for the part, so he hired a robust and muscular Meeker (who'd inherited the Stanley Kowalski part in "Streetcar" when Brando jumped ship for Hollywood a couple years earlier.) "So," Newman told me, "Joanne and I were understudies to Janice Rule and ol' Ralphy-boy, and when he took off for MGM, I got his job. He even told somebody from 'Variety' he was offered the movie version and turned it down, so they gave it to Bill Holden. Ha! Wanna come see me tonight?"
Did I ever! And what happened that night at the Music Box
Theater was more frosting on the cake . . .
