Paul Newman Takes the Stand

Paul Newman sat in the courtroom — in an atmosphere of robes and three-piece — suits with his shoes off. One antiheroic foot was propped up on the defense table. Rebel toes wiggled free inside a black sock. The rest of his body was dressed like Perry Mason, but his feet were still outlaws on the loose, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wearing sock masks.

"Having a good time?" I asked.

"Yeah," Newman said laughing, "because he's such a fuckup."

He did not mean that the judge was a fuckup, or that the bailiff was a fuckup, or that any of the jurors were fuckups. He meant that Sidney Lumet, the distinguished director, was a fuckup.

"Come on," Lumet, the Fuckup, said, "just because you were good this morning doesn't mean you can relax now."

"When you were taller," said Alan King, the comedian, who was visiting the set, "you were nicer."

"I could've been tall," said the Fuckup, "but I turned it down."

Lumet turned down not only tall but also lots of other projects before he agreed to do this movie The Verdict, a courtroom drama starring Paul Newman. One of the extras hired to fill up the courtroom passed the time reading a book entitled The Verdict, by Barry Reed, the novel on which the movie is based. The extra went right on reading the book while the camera was filming the movie.

The Verdict is something of a departure for Paul Newman, because in this movie, he does not play a typical "Paul Newman character." In fact, George Roy Hill, the director and Newman's friend, told him, "I wouldn't cast you in the part, kid." And why not?

"This character is a distance from a lot of characters I've played," Newman explained, "because he's weak, he's panicked, he fucks up. He's not particularly macho. He's not the strong, silent type. It's an absolute 180 from the guy in Absence of Malice. He's vulnerable. He's on the edge of it. He starts face down in the urinal."

There, but for the grace of God — and an ungodly Hollywood fight — would have been Robert Redford with his face in the urinal. For Redford, America's Eagle Scout, was originally cast to play this role of an American fuckup. But who could believe cute Robert Redford with his face in the toilet? Well, Redford certainly couldn't. He wanted the character cleaned up. Which started the fight. A director quit, a studio was in turmoil. And finally Robert Redford himself left.

The producers went out and hired themselves another famous face to go in the urinal. In this case, Butch Cassidy was willing to take a bigger chance with his image than was the Sundance Kid. I wondered: Had the Kid lost his nerve? Had Butch found his?

Sitting on the set of The Verdict surrounded by all the paraphernalia of our judicial system, I also began to think about guilt and innocence. And I even began to wonder what Paul Newman might, or might not, feel guilty about. I think I surprised him with my question.

"Do you feel guilty about anything?"

He hesitated. "I was about to say the thing that you should feel most guilty about is what they pay you." He paused. "But I give almost all of it — I give a lot of it — away. Except if you print that, the letters start coming in."

Ah, guilt Geld. Guilt giving.