The Last Movie Stars

While describing the often-fraught relationship between Paul Newman and his difficult mother, this documentary recounts an argument between them in which Newman's mother, in an attempt to hurt him, claims that she "knows" that Newman's wife, Joanne Woodward, has been having an affair with their friend, Gore Vidal. This led to Newman cutting his mother out of his life for many years afterward. What the documentary does not explain at the moment the story is recounted is why Newman knew this story could not possibly be true: although Woodward and Vidal were briefly engaged when both were very young, Vidal was gay and later in her life Woodward said that the engagement had been only for publicity purposes. In fact, Vidal was one of the few openly gay well-known American public figures during the mid-twentieth century; in 1967, Vidal appeared in the network TV news special The Homosexuals (1967) of CBS Reports (1959) in which he was one of the only self-identified LGBTQ+ people to appear onscreen without his identity being somehow obscured, either facially or through the use of a pseudonym.

Featured in Late Night with Seth Meyers: Ethan Hawke/Retta Sirleaf/Iman Vellani/Art Cruz (2022)