Newman was not around to witness the aftermath of this close encounter, but it undoubtedly would have embarrassed him profoundly. He does not like being treated like a movie star. He’s never, in fact, wanted to think of himself as a star, for to do so would provoke the guilt-inducing possibility that his success is built entirely on his spectacular looks. Thinking of himself as a character actor, he has done his damnedest to resist being a matinee idol. At this he has failed miserably and repeatedly-about as many times as he has been unable to keep his shirt on in a movie. It is the mark of the true and enduring star, no matter how gifted a chameleon, that his persona overwhelms the characters he plays. Newman, a private and complex man doggedly dedicated to disappearing into the roles he plays, has been helpless to erase this mythic doppelganger known as Paul Newman. He must feel, from time to time, the loneliness of the long-distance idol.
There are not many things he has failed at, on screen or off. He sells a salad dressing, and it turns into a multimillion-dollar charitable empire. He takes up car racing at 47, and wins championship trophies. But he has been curiously unsuccessful at acting his age. When Newman settled into his 60s, he gave up glamour roles and began playing elderly men, such as the stodgy Kansas City attorney in “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” or the crusty old rooster Earl Long in “Blaze,” or the venal tycoon in “The Hudsucker Proxy.” These were characters the same age as he was, yet they didn’t quite ring true. When Newman was great on screen, he inhabited a role effortlessly-“Paul Newman is Hud,” ran the ad line, and we believed it. just as he was Fast Eddie in “The Hustler” or Cool Hand Luke or the raucous hockey coach in “Slap Shot” or the ravaged ambulance chaser in “The Verdict.” But old age didn’t come naturally-it was as if he were dressing up in a suit that didn’t fit him, straining to suppress his boyish spirit. He was putting on an act.
Now Newman takes on the role of 60-year-old Sully in Robert Benton’s “Nobody’s Fool,” and something magical happens. This funny, moving and quietly luminous movie (which opens on Christmas Day) is about a man who learns, at a late date in life, to grow up. Sully is a classic Newman type, the older relative of all the intransigent outsiders he played in the ’50s and ’60s, rebellious rakes who cut themselves off from women, from family, from community to pursue their private dreams and demons. But Hud and Fast Eddie had futures; Sully, a part-time construction worker in the small upstate New York town of North Bath, has long since run out of luck. He’s got a bad knee, a boss (Bruce Willis) who gives him constant grief, an unsatisfied yearning for the boss’s pretty wife (Melanie Griffith), a dimwitted partner (Pruitt Taylor Vince) who trails after him like a faithful dog and an estranged son (Dylan Walsh) he deserted as a child. Sully’s selfish, self-involved and a loser. He’s also, like all Newman antiheroes, enormously likable: he bobs above his sea of troubles with cheerfully fatalistic wit. The audience senses, like his landlady and former eighth-grade teacher (Jessica Tandy), that under the barnacles of failure lies a redeemable heart.
When Sully’s son, Peter, brings his family to North Bath for Thanksgiving, the emotional geography of Sully’s life starts to shift. There’s no love lost between the reunited father and son, who harbors deep resentments toward his no-show dad. But Sully’s dormant paternal instincts are stirred by his little, fearful grandson, Will (Alexander Goodwin). Slowly, imperceptibly, this damaged man, who’s always been gun-shy of responsibility, begins to understand that the ties that bind people don’t have to be nooses.
“Nobody’s Fool,” artfully adapted from Richard Russo’s novel by director Benton (“Kramer vs. Kramer”), achieves something you rarely see in American movies anymore -a genuine, unsanctimonious vision of community. The movie is suffused with a generous spirit that stops short of sappiness (it’s too witty to get maudlin). Every character, from Sully’s one-legged Jewish lawyer (Gene Saks) to the wry, seen-it-all bartender Birdy (Margo Martindale), pops indelibly off the screen. Nobody in the story tosses around the word “love,” but that’s what Benton’s movie is about. It’s the last thing Sully ever thought to look for, the one thing he could never step up to, and when it sinks into his skin that he’s surrounded by it, it brings him a kind of grace. In responsibilities begin Sully’s peaceful dreams.
Newman’s rich, understated, delightful performance is seamless. It’s the best he’s been since his 1986 Oscar-winning role in “The Color of Money.” But he brings something more than his deep commitment to the character: there’s the added resonance of all those other Newman roles percolating in the back of the moviegoer’s consciousness. You could say that Newman, like Sully, finally grows up in this movie, that he’s learned how to play his age. He succeeds, however, because he’s not denying his innate vitality: he hasn’t frozen out that irascible, youthful Newman spirit. The persona and the character fit like a glove.
What is it about Newman that his style, his appeal, have never gone out of date? Why do Gen-X kids find him as cool as their fiftysomething parents? Why has he endured when other stars of his generation have fallen by the wayside? The great mystery of his stardom is how he has managed to play so many heels – driven, ambitious, solipsistic men – that the audience falls in love with. The classic example is ““Hud’’ (1963), which was meant to be a scathing indictment of a heartless man. ““You’re an immoral man, Hud. You don’t give a damn,’’ lectures his self-righteous father, Melvyn Douglas. He was right, but we gave a damn about Hud. Imagine Sean Penn playing that role. You’d hate the guy. Without making any obvious appeals for our sympathy, Newman made him irresistibly glamorous.
Newman’s glamour was always approachable, life-size. His beauty – as perfect as a Roman statue – never put men off. And maybe the reason is that he never played heroic parts. Like the flawed Tennessee Williams characters he immortalized – Brick in ““Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’’ (1958) and Chance in ““Sweet Bird of Youth’’ (1962) – he carried a wounded, bruised quality, a sardonic irony that women wanted to console and men could identify with. Early on, Newman was always compared to Brando, his fellow Actors Studio alumnus, but the two men inhabit a different psychic and physical space on the screen. Brando, even when he was trim, was a heavyweight. Newman is our great middleweight movie star. His eternal fitness disqualifies him for tragedy, just as the hint of rigidity in his carriage made him seem uneasy and forced in his blatant comedies (““Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys!’’ ““What a Way to Go!’’). When he strayed too far from American themes and contemporary subjects, he seemed like a fish out of water – try watching him as a dashing anarchist in turn-of-the-century Paris in ““Lady L.’’ It’s not a pretty sight. The two smashingly popular period turns he did with Robert Redford in ““Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’’ (1969) and ““The Sting’’ (1973) don’t apply. They were fake-historical movies, crafted in a deliberately anachronistic style to accommodate the stars’ gift for eternal-adolescent horseplay. I’ve never shared the public’s love for these George Roy Hill elbow-in-the-rib blockbusters, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of Newman’s twinkly-eyed charm. In middle age, he released the sly elf he’d kept a lid on, and in Hill’s 1977 ““Slap Shot’’ he brought his raunchy reprobate side to a consummate boil.
The curious thing about Newman’s enduring status as a romantic heartthrob is that none of his movies are really love stories. The point of ““The Hustler’’ is that he can’t love Piper Laurie. He spends the whole of ““Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’’ withdrawing from Elizabeth Taylor. Hud can’t love anybody. ““Cool Hand Luke’’ is an all-male love fest, and the Redford movies exalt the romance of buddydom. With the arguable exception of ““The Long Hot Summer,’’ the first of 10 movies he made with his wife, Joanne Woodward, none of his stories are driven by a romantic agenda. If he were primarily an action hero, this wouldn’t seem odd. But try to think of a comparably sexy leading man who’s spent so little time in a clinch. Certainly not Clift or Beatty or Redford or, later, Nolte or Mel Gibson. The archetypal Newman heroes balk at intimacy; there is, more often than not, a failure to communicate. But such is the nature of his rapport with an audience (and maybe it has something to do with our knowledge of his lasting, now 36-year marriage to Woodward) that we open our hearts to him, even when he shuts his down. He’s been romancing us, not his leading ladies, these past 40 years. And we love him for it.
The man behind this complex, contradictory persona is no less complex or contradictory – but he bears only an accidental resemblance to the screen icon. He’s sitting in the looming rec room made from a turn-of-the-century barn that sits across from his house in Westport. A giant portrait of Buf-falo Bill on horseback – swiped from the set of ““Buffalo Bill and the Indians’’ – hangs above the fireplace. One wall is covered with photos and awards from his side career as a racing-car driver. Another, bigger wall, is a gallery of friends, family and movie colleagues. There’s Paul, in Roman toga, in his debut film, ““The Silver Chalice.’’ There’s his cherished director, the late Martin Ritt, who guided him through ““Hud’’ and five other movies. A portrait of Olivier, given to him by Sir Larry, broods impressively. Joanne: at home, on locations, taking her husband’s direction in ““Rachel, Rachel.’’ Snaps of his five daughters – two by his first wife, Jacqueline Witte – now grown up. His strikingly handsome son Scott, whose death in 1978 of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose he never speaks of outside the family. This star does not partake in the Oprah-fed culture of confessional candor.
Newman, still as wiry as he was when he played Rocky Graziano in the 1956 ““Somebody Up There Likes Me,’’ is half reclined in a chair, wearing glasses, gray Levi’s and a sweat shirt, playing with his foul-breathed wirehaired terrier Harry. ““He’s the fifth wirehair named Harry we’ve had. We call him Hank Cinq.’’ Affable and unpretentious, he’s happiest talking about anything but himself. Politics is a particular passion. As a dyed-in-the-bone liberal who supported McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, marched for civil rights and appeared at the United Nations as President Carter’s delegate on nuclear disarmament, he’s none too happy about the recent Republican landslide. ““The people that didn’t vote, piss on ’em,’’ he says with gravel-voiced anger. ““It’s funny, I hope that we’re all wrong and they’re right. That the capital-gains tax will in fact trickle down, that it will create jobs, because it would be terrible for this country if this revolution did nothing but increase that gap between the haves and the have-nots.’’ Putting his money where his mouth is, he recently became an investor in The Nation, the venerable left-wing weekly. ““In this climate, it’s just critically important to have opposing voices.’'
““He’s a political animal,’’ says his old writer friend A. E. Hotchner, his partner in Newman’s Own products. But Newman would never run for office himself. ““He considers himself too mercurial to woo the electorate.’’ Also, the pontificating role doesn’t suit him. ““He’s not a moralizer,’’ explains another writer friend, the novelist Robert Stone. ““He tries to find people who can answer his questions before he finds people to preach to.’’ Above all, Newman, who calls himself ““a middle-of-the-road anarchist,’’ loves to tell jokes. At the moment, he’s got one about his current political bete noire, New York’s Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, whose rendition of ““Old MacDonald Had a Farm’’ on the Senate floor Newman found particularly disgusting. So he tells me his joke:
““There are these three guys in a truck. It’s night and the truck breaks down and they find their way to a farmer’s house. The farmer says, “It’s OK, but I can only put two of you up in the house; one of you’s got to stay in the barn.’ Now, these three guys – one is a guy of Indian persuasion, one is Jewish and one is Sen. Alfonse D’Amato. The Indian fella says, “What’s the big deal? You guys go up and I’ll sleep in the barn.’ Five minutes later there’s a knock on the door. It’s the Indian. He says, “I can’t sleep out there, there’s a cow in the barn.’ The Jewish fella says, “No big deal, I’ll go sleep in the barn.’ Five minutes later there’s a knock at the door; it’s the Jewish fella and he says, “I can’t sleep in the barn, there’s a pig out there.’ So Alfonse D’Amato says, “I will go sleep in the barn.’ Five minutes later there’s a knock on the door. It’s the pig.''
Newman’s taste for elaborate practical jokes is legendary in Hollywood. There was the Porsche he had crushed, beribboned and installed in Robert Redford’s hallway. On the set of ““The Mackintosh Man,’’ to torment director John Huston, he constructed a realistic effigy of himself that he hauled to the top of a tower. When the director called ““Action,’’ the dummy was flung over the parapet – and almost gave Huston a heart attack. ““I think that my sense of humor is the only thing that keeps me sane,’’ he says. He’s bothered that in many pieces written about him he comes across as dour. ““The thing is, most people ask dour questions . . . “How do you sustain your marriage?’ ''
This day he seems quite jolly. But I can remember, after sitting in this same room with him eight years ago, feeling he was more haunted than happy. The man eludes snap judgments. He can be a Budweiser-drinking, car-racing cutup one moment and a pensive artist the next, insisting that Glenn Gould’s original recording of Bach’s ““Goldberg Variations’’ is superior to his later version. ““I think he’s a very shy man,’’ says ““Cool Hand Luke’’ director Stuart Rosenberg. ““He’s very private, very difficult to get to know. There are unspoken limits.''
There is universal accord on his professionalism. Newman takes acting very seriously: he always arrives on a set on time, thoroughly prepared and in a collaborative spirit. In a world of raging egos, Newman refuses to throw his weight around. There were 17 snowstorms during the making of ““Nobody’s Fool,’’ Benton recalls, and Newman and Melanie Griffith had to play an outdoor love scene in 20-below weather, but Newman ““never lost his temper. He’s the best gentleman I’ve ever met in 30 years of movies.’’ Newman comes from a ’50s generation of Method actors predisposed to distrust the trappings of stardom, and he’s never lost the suspicion that he’s overly rewarded for his job. This is not a philosophy in vogue in today’s Hollywood, where one well-known actress, who will wash her hair only with Evian, makes the studio pay for the water. Newman, who liked to take a one-hour sauna before working, to focus his concentration, refused while making ““The Verdict’’ to let the production pay for his portable sauna.
Think of him as a slightly bent straight arrow, with an old-fashioned sense that a man ought to give something back to the world. His extraordinary philanthropy started as a lark, when he and Hotchner decided to bottle Newman’s Own salad dressing. It was a way he could milk his celebrity without guilt. Why not give the proceeds away to charity? ““Our motto,’’ he explains, ““was “Shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good’.’’ There are now 19 Newman’s Own products, from spaghetti sauce to popcorn. In the past 12 years the company has netted almost $60 million, all donated to causes he and Hotchner deem worthy, from a little school run by three nuns in Florida for the children of migrant laborers to early AIDS research to his favorite environmental and educational causes. He founded the Scott Newman Center in Los Angeles to fight drug abuse. And he started the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children with cancer and serious blood diseases in Ashford, Conn. ““He doesn’t just write a check,’’ explains his daughter Susan. ““He goes up there weekends and hangs with the kids.’’ Where does this altruism come from? ““Paul is vulnerable to the needs of people,’’ posits Hotchner, ““and he’s vulnerable to his own vulnerability. I think that recognition of vulnerability in a role or in life is what’s given him his drive. It’s the essential thing of his personality.''
Maybe Newman’s integrity, like his blue eyes, is just something he can’t help. At one point during our interview he stopped to speak to his wife on the phone. Hanging up, he turned to me and said, ““Joanne sends her love.’’ He paused, hearing himself. ““No, actually, Joanne says hi.’’ How can you not like this guy?
I ask him what’s the best part of getting older. ““I can’t think of anything that gets better with aging. I’m not mellower, I’m not less angry, I’m not less self-critical, I’m not less tenacious. Maybe the best part is that your liver can’t handle those beers at noon anymore,’’ he says, sipping a soda. ““I can’t think of the worst part either. I don’t know what’s changed. Oh, you can’t get to the net as quickly. So what? It’s not of consequence.''
But he is gripped by nostalgia. ““Because the old days were better. Not because you were youthful but because the days themselves were different and better. Look at the life of an actor in 1953 and look at the life of an actor today. Television was just getting started. In the theater, we still had Tennessee and Arthur Miller and Inge and Chayefsky, and off-Broadway was just taking off. The psychological drama was just getting a kickoff. And the back of the studio system was beginning to be broken. It was vibrant. The streets were safe. People felt good about the government. You could buy a house for $11,000. And failure was not expensive.
““So that’s what’s difficult about getting old – remembering the way things used to be. There were such things as loyalty. The community had not disintegrated. The individual had not been deified at the expense of everything around him. Goddam – that’s the difficult part. I don’t think that’s just an old codger, you know, wishing for the old days. Goddam, they were better. There was a lot of ugliness but there was a lot more grace.''
Newman has to get moving. He’s got Hole in the Wall Gang Camp business to attend to – he’s eagerly looking forward to their big Christmas party – and then he has to drive back to Manhattan, where he has a Fifth Avenue apartment. We say goodbye at the waiting cab, and the girl in the back seat is already quivering in star-struck thrall. Some things don’t change.
