“How dare you?”: when Paul Newman’s ‘Quintet’ role enraged Grace Kelly
Paul Newman made no shortage of classic movies during his five-decade career. In the span of less than ten years, he made Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting, three of the best movies of the era. Starting out in Hollywood in the 1950s, Newman got to see the industry undergo a sea change when a feisty new generation of renegade independent filmmakers displaced the lumbering studio system of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.
Newman’s rebellious sensibilities put him more in concert with the latter wave of Hollywood, which was probably the reason he was able to make the transition so smoothly while other stars of the Golden Age, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Kirk Douglas, struggled to find their footing. That said, the actor was able to maintain friendships with the people he met during his early years in the industry, including Grace Kelly, who left Hollywood to become the Princess of Monaco in 1956.
She never made a film with Newman, but Kelly kept tabs on his career even after she’d left America for the European monarchy. This turned out to be a painful experience for her in 1979, when she saw her friend’s performance in Robert Altman’s flop, Quintet. Set in a distant future where the world has been consumed by an ice age, it follows a group of survivors who live in a hotel and play a board game called Quintet. When played in its most extreme variation, the game dictates life and death.
Altman was coming off of a string of successes when he made the film, having announced himself as one of Hollywood’s great auteurs with 1975’s Nashville. But Quintet was an expensive disaster, a high-concept gamble that was roundly dismissed as self-important and shallow. Altman later admitted that the film wouldn’t have worked under any circumstances because it wasn’t suited to a mass audience. Newman had thrown himself into the project with a collaborative spirit that greatly impressed the director, but even he couldn’t singlehandedly save the picture from itself.
Altman remembered the negative reactions he got to the film, including from one of the star’s most famous friends.“Princess Grace said to the board at Fox, ‘How dare you allow my good friend and wonderful actor Paul Newman to be in such an atrocious Robert Altman film?’” the director recalled. “And [20th Century Fox president] Allan Ladd Jr, who had heard a lot of complaints about the film, just jumped up and said, ‘Oh, fuck you,’ and walked out.”
Saying “fuck you” to a princess is dramatic, even by Hollywood standards, but Ladd’s fury was a testament to how disappointing the film had been for the studio. With a budget of more than $9 million, it flopped hard at the box office, calling Altman’s much-celebrated abilities into question. For Newman’s career, it left barely a scratch. He still had some of his greatest roles ahead of him, including Absence of Malice, The Verdict, The Color of Money, and Road to Perdition.
