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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.
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The movie star went back to work, and I went back to daydreaming. Movie sets are great places for daydreaming, for a movie company's cameras turn even more slowly than the wheels of justice. So while I watched the slow progress of this imaginary trial, I had plenty of time to imagine an imaginary trial of my own — sort of a make-believe trial within a make-believe trial. My daydream also starred Paul Newman.
I was the prosecutor and Paul Newman was the defendant. When he took the stand, I cross-examined him mercilessly. After all, I have long believed that reporters and prosecutors have a lot in common.
I imagined myself asking, "Mr. Newman, you are charged with being an actor. How do you plead?"
And I imagined Paul Newman responding, "Guilty."
ME: And how does being an actor make you feel?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: You are further charged with being a movie star. How do you plead?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: And how does that make you feel?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: You are also charged with being a superstar. How does that make you feel?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: You are also charged with being too good-looking. How do you feel?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: And you are charged with making too much money. How do you feel?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: Does all of this superstar guilt have anything to do with your choosing to play a character who is not a super anything? Not a super lawyer. Not a super looker. Just a super fuckup. Is this expiation?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: Mr. Newman, in this movie, you try to protect your clients' rights, but in real life, you seem to want to protect the whole world. You seem to want to save the world from nuclear destruction. How do you plead to this charge?
NEWMAN: Guilty as sin.
ME: And how does trying to save the world make you feel?
NEWMAN: A little less guilty.
"I need this wall inverted," shouted Sidney Lumet, bringing me out of my reverie. "Probably without the columns."
While they were rearranging the courtroom walls, Paul Newman slipped his outlaw feet into black wing-tip lawyer shoes but did not bother to lace them up or tie them. I followed him as he shuffled through the maze of sets and props that cluttered the cavernous Astoria Studio in Astoria, Queens. When Paul Newman was a down-and-out actor trying to break into show business thirty years ago, he knocked on the door of this studio, but they wouldn't even let him in. And now he has the largest dressing room in the joint. When we reached it, he kicked off his shoes.
We sat down, and I started cross-examining him about his dual careers, the one as a movie star (which makes him a lot of money) and the other as a world saver (which costs him a lot of money). These two roles seemed to come together in a curious way a few years ago, when he visited the White House.
"I spent about fifteen minutes with Carter in the Oval Office," Paul Newman said. "God, I was uncomfortable. But that's my problem, not his."
He had gone to the White House for a briefing because he had been named a citizen's delegate to a United Nations conference on nuclear disarmament. The actor had been speaking out against nuclear weapons for years. He had also joined the board of — and given lots of money to — the Center for Defense Information, which does its best to wage a sort of propaganda war against the Defense Department. But his appointment by the Carter administration as a delegate to the United Nations conference would be an escalation of his war against nuclear war. So he did all he could to prepare for it, reading, studying — and going to Washington D.C. to meet in the basement of the White House with David Aaron, one of the president's national-security advisers. After the briefing, Paul Newman was on his way out of the White House when he was recognized by someone.
"I was just walking down the hall, and Carter came out of a door. And we just bumped into each other.
"He said, 'What are you doing here?'"
"I said, 'Nothing.'"
"He said, 'Why don't you come on up?'"
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The movie star told the President of the United States that he thought he could work him into his schedule. He was looking forward to a heart-to-heart with the commander in chief about saving the world from nuclear destruction, but the commander in chief had other ideas.
"I wanted to talk to him about SALT II, and he wanted to talk about how you made movies. What made me pick the roles I picked? How long did it take to make a movie? What was the time it took to put the movie together after you finish shooting?"
The movie star wanted to talk about first strikes; the President of the United States wanted to talk about first breaks. The movie star wanted to talk about first breaks. The movie star wanted to talk about the Pentagon budget; the President of the United States wanted to talk about movie budgets. The movie star wanted to talk about bombs; the President of the United States wanted to talk about blockbusters. The movie star wanted to talk about nuclear shells; the President of the United States wanted to talk about bombshells. It was as if they would have liked to trade places.
And perhaps they would have.
Listening to Paul Newman, I began to appreciate the uneasiness the star must have felt in the Oval Office. Only a part of his discomfort was the result of the president's fan-magazine curiosity. Another part was simply due to his innate shyness.
ME: Mr. Newman, you are charged with being a shy superstar. How do you plead?
NEWMAN: Well, um, uh...
Paul Newman was called back to the set, where some bad news awaited him. He was informed that the child of a close friend had committed suicide. This tragedy was sad not only in and of itself, but because it must have opened up an old wound: Newman could not help but remember his own son's death of a drug overdose in the fall of 1978.
But he still had a scene to do.
The camera had been moved into the judge's chambers, which were just off the courtroom. In this scene, Newman, playing a lawyer who is perilously near a personal breakdown, was supposed to get into a shouting match with the judge. His honor was played by Milo O'Shea. Sidney Lumet arrived on the set looking as refreshed as Paul Newman looked subdued.
"Did you have a good sleep?" asked Alan King.
Lumet formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
"He can sleep anywhere," King said.
While the crew did some last-minute lighting, King went on to tell a story about the worst coast-to-coast trip he'd ever taken. He'd boarded a plane in Vancouver that was bound nonstop for New York. He was alone in the first-class cabin until just before the aircraft took off, and then in walked Henny Youngman.
"I was locked in a first-class cabin with Henny Youngman from Vancouver to New York," King said. "He started right away: 'Take my wife, please.' All the way to New York. It was just unbelievable torture. What a nightmare!"
I wondered if Paul Newman felt the same way about this scene. Did he feel trapped on the set with a comedian (who did not know about the tragedy) making jokes? Did he wish he could escape into some private place for private mourning? Had the scene become a torture and a nightmare? I could not see the answer to my questions in the actor's face. Some actors use their talent to showcase their emotions; others use the same talent to hide what they are feeling. Paul Newman is one of the latter group. A Very Cool Hand Luke.
And yet he must have been thinking back almost four years to the time he received the tragic news about son Scott, who died at the age of twenty-eight. Back then, he had had work to do, too — ironically, work with young people, for he had returned to his alma mater, Kenyon College, to direct a college play. When he learned what had happened, he assembled his student players and told them, "It would help me if you'd be as rowdy as possible." That night, several of his actors dressed up in funny costumes and rang his doorbell as if they were collegiate trick-or-treaters. When he opened the door, these mummers handed him a case of beer and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Newman took a swallow from the bottle and said, "It's the first time I've touched hard stuff in eight years."
ME: Weren't you left feeling more guilty than ever?
NEWMAN: I'd rather not talk about it.
"Okay, my dears," said Sidney Lumet, "from the top. Burtt, give me fresh bells."
"Ring 'em," said Burtt Harris, the first assistant director on the movie. And what sounded like a loud telephone rang out three times in the hangar of a soundstage. "Turn 'em."
"Rolling," someone yelled.
"Speed," someone else yelled.
Soon, Paul Newman was ranting and raving, accusing the judge of being on the take.
"I'm gonna take the transcript of this trial," Newman almost shouted, "and um, uh..." He grabbed his throat to show that he had choked. He laughed. "I'm gonna take this speech and stuff it."
"Like it, Alan?" asked Lumet.
"I think you should tell him to talk louder," King said. "You gotta tell these actors to project."
They got ready to try again.
"Okay, loves."
"Ring 'em. Turn 'em over."
"Rolling."
"Speed."
Newman started yelling at the judge again.
"I'm gonna take a transcript of this trial to the Judicial Conduct Board...and I'm gonna impeach your...gonna impeach your ass, if I can ever say it. Get Alan King to play it."
"Here he is," said Lumet.
"I don't use profanity," said King.
They tried again.
"Turn 'em over."
"Rolling."
"Speed."
"I'm gonna..." faltered Newman. "I'm gonna...your ass."
"Get out of here," said the judge, continuing the already crippled scene, "before I call the bailiff and have you thrown in jail."
"Throw him in jail," laughed Lumet. "Fuck him."
They did another take. The bells rang. The camera turned over. Speed. But this one did not work either.
"I'm sorry," Newman said. "I'm way off."
"One more," said Lumet.
"Arggghh."
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Now Newman seemed upset, but I could not be sure whether he was acting or living; whether what disturbed him was the real-life tragedy or the make-believe scene, or some combination of both.
ME: Mr. Newman, isn't it true that you mask your emotions?
NEWMAN: Fifth Amendment.
The next take was imperfect too, but Sidney Lumet adjourned court for the day anyway.
The next morning, Paul Newman got up at his New York apartment at five-thirty. While he was doing his exercises, he watched the twenty-four-hour cable news service.
And then came one of his favorite parts of the day. He retired into the wet womb of his sauna with no company but the New York Times. Newman treasures this time because it is the only time in his day when he can count upon being absolutely alone and undisturbed. Spreading the Times across his lap, the superstar absorbed his morning paper in more ways than one. The columns of newsprint were imprinted not only on his mind but also on his body, for the wet words came off on his hands and his thighs and, well, everything else. Newman sat there literally soaking up the Great Gray Lady — all the news that was fit to print being printed in places not normally fit for news. Soon, he looked like a living version of the Absence of Malice advertisement, which is a photograph of the actor with newsprint superimposed on it. When he finally emerged from the sauna, Paul Newman looked like a combination of superstar and newspaper...which is what he really wants to be.
When he arrived at the studio, Newman installed a big bowl of fresh popcorn on the coffee table in his dressing room. The movie star repeatedly dipped his hand into the movie food. Next to the popcorn was a book on disarmament. The coffee table was a microcosm of Paul Newman's two worlds.
Munching popcorn, too, I continued to interrogate the witness: "What kind of political atmosphere did you grow up in?"
"My mother was not political at all," said the defendant. "My father was Rooseveltian. He was incredibly moral and ethical about everything he did. He and his brother ran a sporting-goods store. During the Depression, eighty-five percent of the sporting-goods stores failed, because it was obviously a luxury. In the worst time of the Depression, they went to Spalding and Wilson and got something like $200,000 worth of goods on consignment, which was unheard of simply because they had never reneged on a bill or sent back a piece of equipment unless it was obviously defective. They had an incredible reputation."
"Do you consider yourself your father's boy or your mother's boy?"
"I guess I'm my father's boy," Newman said after a long, shy pause. "That's one of my great sadnesses, actually. He died in 1950. I had just graduated, and I had just made up my mind to be involved in the theater, one way or the other. And I think he saw that as a dead end. It would have been nice for him at least to have been around for..."
"How old was your father when he died?"
"Fifty-seven years old."
ME: Mr. Newman, you are charged with being fifty-seven yourself. How do you plead?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
"What did your father want you to do?"
"Oh, I think he wanted me to stay in business. Actually, after he died, I went back and worked at the store for a while. But I couldn't figure out the romance of retailing."
ME: Mr. Newman, you are charged with still trying to win your late father's approval. How do you plead?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: Your father didn't respect acting, so you have to do something else to impress him. Like save the world. How do you plead?
NEWMAN: I said I was guilty.
"Do you have any idea why you happened to do such a rash thing as go into acting?"
"Well, I don't know. I had never done anything well. My ambition had always been greater than my talent, whether it was athletics or academics, or whatever it was. But the best of whatever I did was in the theater, and that wasn't very good, but it was still the best that I had."
"Did you try some sports that didn't work?"
"I wanted to play football so bad. And I played in junior high school. But in high school, in the ninth grade, I still weighed ninety-eight pounds and was about five foot three. So I had to get a special dispensation so I wouldn't have to play with the lightweights, because the lightweights were all sixth-graders. And I was fucked if I was going to play with those guys. So I couldn't play at all in high school."
ME: The son of the sporting-goods mogul didn't play football?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
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Back on the set, Paul Newman sat down at the defense table and slipped off his shoes. And then, sitting there in his stocking feet, he made an effort to bring his political life and his acting life together in one place at one time. While the director blocked out the scene, the star sat writing out, in longhand, an antinuclear tract. He was enough of an entertainer to make his propaganda funny. He was working on a checklist of what to do in case of an evacuation before a nuclear attack: don't forget your vitamin pills, pack your stocks and bonds and other securities, and take along clean underwear.
Paul Newman explained that the antinuclear speech he was writing was for a small film to be called The Last Epidemic, in which a group of doctors would describe what a nuclear blast would do to a population center.
"They want Joanne and me to introduce it," Newman said.
Joanne Woodward, his wife, had recently been in the hospital for a foot operation.
"I thought Joanne was under doctor's orders to take it easy," someone said.
"The only way she would ever lie down and be quiet," Newman said, "would be on a hand grenade."
Then he suddenly broke out into a softshoe dance. It was as though he were no longer in his fifties but in his twenties. He seemed once again to be a Kenyon College boy putting on the only Kenyon musical in Christ knows how long.
Up in his dressing room, we reminisced more about the early days of a superstar. He talked about the first stirrings of his acting and activist careers.
After his graduation from Kenyon College in 1949, Newman spent a season doing summer stock. But then his father died, and guilt sent him back to work in his father's store.
"I was a pretty good salesman," he said.
The superstar was a supersalesman for a little over a year before he turned the business over to his older brother. For some reason, first children, like Paul's older brother, tend to run businesses, run for office, run the country. Younger children, who have to show off to get attention, are more likely to go into show business. Young Paul went east to take lessons in showing off.
"I took off to Yale with a wife and a child," Newman remembered, "and I think I had about $1300."
After a year at the Yale Drama School, he headed for New York, only to have the Astoria Studio close its doors to him. But he was not the only one having trouble getting work. A lot of people were being turned out of jobs they had had for a long time. Those troubled times made a lasting impression.
"I wasn't politically active until the early Fifties," Paul Newman said.
"What happened?"
"McCarthy. I heard about people losing their jobs. As a matter of fact, my cousin was involved. I think that's probably what brought it home. He was with Westinghouse. He was one of the guys who was intimately involved with the development of the proximity fuse, which was probably the second most important military development in the war. He was thrown out because he was no longer considered a good security risk."
This cousin was considered unstable on several counts. "One, he had been divorced. Two, he was married to a woman of Russian extraction, but she had been a citizen of this country for I don't know how many years. And, three, he was known to consort with homosexuals, because he was on the board of the Cleveland Playhouse. It was just incredible. That whole time.
"I was just starting, in 1952, making the rounds and not getting a lot of work."
The cousin fought back in court, where he eventually won back his job. Paul Newman attempted to fight back on a broader front by getting into politics.
"I campaigned for Adlai Stevenson. Stuffing envelopes."
"After high school, I had three months of college and then joined the navy on my eighteenth birthday."
"You volunteered?"
"Times change. I volunteered. I don't think I would volunteer for duty now."
The year was 1943.
"I didn't know what was going on. Hadn't the slightest idea. Just reckless and irresponsible. The first test I took was the color-chart test. I was out on my ass. Colorblind."
ME: Mr. Newman, is it true that the most beautifully colored male eyes in the world are colorblind?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
"I got sent to Yale for officer's training because they didn't know what to do with me. The first time I got in my uniform, I was walking down to get a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. A guy looked over at me, and I thought he was gay or something. I had my sailor outfit, my hat on."
"He looked at me and said, 'Aren't you a little old to be in the Sea Scouts?'"
ME: Mr. Newman, isn't it a fact that you sometimes feel the same way as an actor? That you are a little old to be dressing up in costumes and playing roles?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
"Then I wound up in boot camp. I was a pretty good radio man but a terrible gunner.The guy who taught me was Bob Stack."
ME: Isn't it a fact, Mr. Newman, that Eliot Ness taught Butch Cassidy how to shoot?
NEWMAN:Ugh! You got me.
"I think we took some potshots at submarines that we saw. And a couple of times, flying over Saipan, we saw some Japanese guys, and we strafed them. I had a 30-caliber machine gun in the tail, which, of course, was like a pea shooter. It was the same as pissing into a propeller."
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"Where were you," I asked the actor who wants to save the world from nuclear destruction, "when you heard about Hiroshima?"
"I was about seventy-five miles off the coast of Japan in a fleet carrier. I didn't know what it meant. I was twenty years old, and I had no idea of the consequences of it. No one even discussed the morality of it or the alternatives."
"On board ship, was there a sense of celebration?"
"Oh, sure, it was just over. We shipped right back to Pearl Harbor and came right back to this country. I came out of the navy just as dumb as I went in."
But Paul Newman did not emerge from the navy completely unchanged.
"In the navy, I grew six inches in one year. When I went back to college, Kenyon College, the first thing I did was try out for football. I was fast. I weighed 152 pounds and was a defensive linebacker.
"My first year, I was an economics major. My second year, I switched to an English major. And then I got kicked off the football team because a bunch of us got rowdy in a bar and got thrown in the slammer overnight. And all the kids in the courtyard were coming by singing Kenyon songs. It was just gorgeous. Very touching.
"What happened was, all of these college guys were trying to pick up town girls,' cause Kenyon wasn't coed then. We were always getting in fights with the town guys — a bloody nose, a black eye, a chipped tooth — but the next day, you'd see the guy in the street and say, 'Hi.' So, anyway, one night somebody called the cops. And two plain-clothesmen came through the door. Our quarterback didn't have any idea who they were, and he decked one of them. The cops dragged him and another guy off. And he flipped me his keys and said, 'Bring my car into town if you can.' I said,'Sure.'"
"So I walked into the police station and said, 'I would like to give these keys to my friend.'"
"He said, 'Let me take a look at your knuckles.'"
"So the door slammed behind me, and they went out and got the other two guys in the car, and they threw them in the slammer, too. And the next day, on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the first bottom two columns, the sentence was, 'Kenyon's traditional nontraining football team is in trouble again.'"
"So they threw two of us out of school and put three of us on probation. I was damned if I was going to study, so I just tried out for a play. And I think the next two years I did something like ten plays. I did the lead in The Front Page. I wrote, directed, starred in and produced the only musical at Kenyon in Christ knows how long."
ME:Mr. Newman, isn't it a fact that you only became an actor because you got thrown off the football team?
NEWMAN: Maybe.
ME: And aren't you still trying to make that team? Don't you still want to play with the big boys and impress your father? Dabbling in politics? Racing cars?
"Oh, I suppose there is a connection," Newman said. "I don't know what the connection is exactly, but I suppose there is."
Back on the set, Paul Newman sat down at the defense table and slipped off his shoes. And then, sitting there in his stocking feet, he made an effort to bring his political life and his acting life together in one place at one time. While the director blocked out the scene, the star sat writing out, in longhand, an antinuclear tract. He was enough of an entertainer to make his propaganda funny. He was working on a checklist of what to do in case of an evacuation before a nuclear attack: don't forget your vitamin pills, pack your stocks and bonds and other securities, and take along clean underwear.
Paul Newman explained that the antinuclear speech he was writing was for a small film to be called The Last Epidemic, in which a group of doctors would describe what a nuclear blast would do to a population center.
"They want Joanne and me to introduce it," Newman said.
Joanne Woodward, his wife, had recently been in the hospital for a foot operation.
"I thought Joanne was under doctor's orders to take it easy," someone said.
"The only way she would ever lie down and be quiet," Newman said, "would be on a hand grenade."
Then he suddenly broke out into a softshoe dance. It was as though he were no longer in his fifties but in his twenties. He seemed once again to be a Kenyon College boy putting on the only Kenyon musical in Christ knows how long.
Up in his dressing room, we reminisced more about the early days of a superstar. He talked about the first stirrings of his acting and activist careers.
After his graduation from Kenyon College in 1949, Newman spent a season doing summer stock. But then his father died, and guilt sent him back to work in his father's store.
"I was a pretty good salesman," he said.
The superstar was a supersalesman for a little over a year before he turned the business over to his older brother. For some reason, first children, like Paul's older brother, tend to run businesses, run for office, run the country. Younger children, who have to show off to get attention, are more likely to go into show business. Young Paul went east to take lessons in showing off.
"I took off to Yale with a wife and a child," Newman remembered, "and I think I had about $1300."
After a year at the Yale Drama School, he headed for New York, only to have the Astoria Studio close its doors to him. But he was not the only one having trouble getting work. A lot of people were being turned out of jobs they had had for a long time. Those troubled times made a lasting impression.
"I wasn't politically active until the early Fifties," Paul Newman said.
"What happened?"
"McCarthy. I heard about people losing their jobs. As a matter of fact, my cousin was involved. I think that's probably what brought it home. He was with Westinghouse. He was one of the guys who was intimately involved with the development of the proximity fuse, which was probably the second most important military development in the war. He was thrown out because he was no longer considered a good security risk."
This cousin was considered unstable on several counts. "One, he had been divorced. Two, he was married to a woman of Russian extraction, but she had been a citizen of this country for I don't know how many years. And, three, he was known to consort with homosexuals, because he was on the board of the Cleveland Playhouse. It was just incredible. That whole time.
"I was just starting, in 1952, making the rounds and not getting a lot of work."
The cousin fought back in court, where he eventually won back his job. Paul Newman attempted to fight back on a broader front by getting into politics.
"I campaigned for Adlai Stevenson. Stuffing envelopes."
Sidney Lumet sat in his folding canvas director's chair attacking the script with a red grease pencil. He slashed back and forth, back and forth, treating the screenplay the way Jack the Ripper used to treat prostitutes. The pages were drenched in red and looked bloody. Actually, Lumet was simply crossing out the scenes that he had already filmed.
The movie star crept up on his director and began to imitate him. Sidney Lumet sliced a page from ear to ear. And Paul Newman sliced, too. Lumet carved a bloody X in the flesh of the script. And Newman did the same. Newman was in mid-imitation when Lumet looked up — and grinned. It was as if he were smiling at himself.
"How much time did we pick up in just that last section?" asked Newman.
"Two days," said Lumet.
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Since moviemaking is such a slow business, there is really no such thing as a fast moviemaker, but Sidney Lumet is faster than most. He appears to make movies in a sort of fast slow motion. Lumet's style of moviemaking seems to be summed up by a T-shirt worn by one of his assistant directors — a T-shirt that sports a picture of two turtles who are making love, with one of the turtles saying, "Faster! Faster!"
"I'm gonna start calling him Speedy Gonzales," Newman said of Lumet. "He's the only guy who could double-park in front of a whorehouse. He's that fast."
Young paul finally got a job as an understudy to Ralph Meeker in the stage play Picnic. And he was accepted by the Actors Studio, where he studied under Lee Strasberg. Then, he went to work for his once-and-future director: Sidney Lumet.
"The first live television shows that I did were with him," Newman recalled in his dressing room between faster-faster scenes. "He was directing You Were There. I played Aristotle once; I played Caesar, Socrates, Nathan Hale." Television was where Lumet learned to be the fastest fucking turtle in the race. "Interesting times."
Finally, in 1954, Paul Newman's motion-picture career got off to a start when he was cast in The Silver Chalice. This movie has embarrassed him ever since. At least his father did not live to see it.
ME: Isn't it a fact that recently, when The Silver Chalice appeared on television, you took out an ad in Variety asking people not to watch?
NEWMAN: Guilty.
ME: And didn't that just hype the ratings?
NEWMAN: Okay, okay, I plead guilty to doing somethin' dumb.
In 1956, Paul Newman made his second movie, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and somebody up there — and lots of people out there — seemed to.
And then, all the famous roles started coming, one after the other. He has been nominated for an Oscar five times, although he has yet to win one. The Verdict is his forty-third starring role.
"If you were going to play yourself in The Paul Newman Story, how would you do it?"
His makeup man was busy combing and spraying his graying hair.
"I haven't the slightest idea. You know, sometimes you think you have a very great sense of definition of yourself. And you wake up the next morning and you look in the mirror, and you think you're nothing but a hangover of all the parts you've played ? a little bit of Hud over here, a little of The Hustler there, and you don't find any definition of your own character at all.
"One morning, you wake up and say the work you're doing is very important and difficult and worthwhile and rewarding. And the next day, you wake up and you say, 'What is this kid stuff?' You're just being a child out there. And the next day, you wake up and think you're a shit, that you can't do anything right, and you're terrible."
"Has this feeling grown as you've gotten older?"
"Yeah. I think it's grown."
"Have you ever said to yourself that maybe your dad was right, after all?"
"Well, there's some part of me, obviously, that would like to be a gentleman farmer or a marine biologist. Yeah, I'd like to get out of some aspects of this rat race...the flashbulbs. I guess the only thing that would have any kind of lure would be politics. But I would be elected for the wrong reasons."
ME: You are charged with wanting more out of life than being a movie star.
NEWMAN: Innocent Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Guilty Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
"You're almost finished," Sidney Lumet told his star. "All the looping you'll have to do are the cuss words for TV." By looping, he meant rerecording bits of dialogue that could be spliced into the picture's soundtrack. "You can say ass now. I heard it on ABC."
"This ABC guy called me the other day," said Newman. "He said, 'I don't know what to do. We've bought Slapshot, but there are 176 fucks.' He'd counted them all." And then Newman turned to me."I hope you'll edit some of my profanity out of your story. Ever since Slapshot, I've been swearing more. You get a hangover from a character like that, and you simply don't get rid of it. I knew I had a problem when I turned to my daughter one day and said, 'Please pass the fuckin' salt.'"
ME: Mr. Newman, Isn't it a fact that at an advanced age, you took up not only swearing but also racing, in an attempt to recapture youth?
NEWMAN: I'll bet my body's younger than yours.
ME: Guilty. But how did you get interested in racing?
"I did a picture about racing in 1967, Winning," Newman told me while he sat in a makeup chair. "It took me four years to clear my schedule so that I could go and get my license and start driving. Like everything else, it took a long time. I really don't have any natural talent for any of that stuff, and I suspect the guys on the circuit were calling me a real balloon foot. I'm a very slow learner. The same with acting. But one thing is interesting to learn in acting: you cannot let it affect you when people laugh at you. If you don't take chances in rehearsals, you might just as well get out of the business. You've got to have enough courage to fall on your ass and not pay any attention to what the people are saying."
"And you were able to apply this to racing as well?"
"Oh, yeah."
"And to life in general?"
"I'm not so sure about that."
"Okay, let's make a movie," yelled Sidney Lumet. "Paul, are you winded? Let me know when you're on your third lap."
Paul Newman was doing laps, but not the kind he enjoyed. Not race-car laps on a race track. But hard-breathing jogging laps. The fifty-seven-year-old actor was running laps around the huge soundstage so that he would be out of breath when the camera rolled.
"Bells. Turn over. Speed."
Newman burst into the judge's chambers breathing hard and apologizing for being late.
"Let's do it again."
The aging superstar ran more studio laps.
"Turn. Speed."
Another breathless apology.
"One more time."
Newman slumped in imitation of an old man who had to be helped around the set.
"You were twenty-six when you began this job," said a grip. "Or was that one of your kids?"
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Onto the coffee table, beside the bowl of popcorn and the book on disarmament, Paul Newman dropped a letter from Sally Field, his costar in his most recent movie, Absence of Malice. In her loopy, girlish handwriting, she congratulated him for his Academy Award nomination for his performance in that picture. The letter closed, "I love you always." But it added, "P.S. Give Joanne a big kiss."
"The movie was a direct attack on the New York Post," Newman said. "Well, put it this way: I was emotionally receptive to doing a piece about sloppy journalism. I wish I could sue the Post, but it's awfully hard to sue a garbage can."
Absence of Malice tells the story of a man who is libeled by a newspaper and strikes back. The paper prints a misleading story that embarrasses him, and he tricks it into running a misleading story that embarrasses the journalists.
Newman felt that the Post had done a somewhat comparable injustice to him in real life when he was filming Fort Apache, the Bronx. According to Newman, the paper wrote endlessly about demonstrators who were supposedly against the movie but who, for the most part, did not really exist. Newman was particularly upset by a picture caption that said he was trying to ward off demonstrators; he was really warding off photographers. He says he hates Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Post, almost as much as he hates nuclear warheads. He would like to rid the world of both menaces. At the very least, he dreams of getting even, like the character he played, perhaps even in the same way.
"What someone might do is invent something," Newman said. "Something really insulting. Like Murdoch can't spell and has to carry a pocket dictionary. That he got picked up at a very early age for having sex with chickens."
After the break, Paul Newman went back to running laps on the soundstage. Huff, puff. Huff, puff. He no longer sounded like Butch Cassidy on the run. He sounded like what he was, a man in his fifties, out of breath. Which was appropriate, since he was playing an almost-over-the-hill, out-of-shape, down-and-out ambulance chaser.
ME: And now, Your Honor, I would like to call an important surprise witness.
"In the last year, he has been reaching out in a more direct way," said Susan Newman, Paul's twenty-nine-year-old daughter. "Less guarded. More open. We've become closer. Daddy has really made an effort recently. Perhaps has priorities have changed. Scott's death had something to do with it."
She paused.
"Maybe he's going through some sort of midlife crisis. He's changing physically. He's changing mentally. He's a sex symbol, and he's getting older. He decided he wanted to do some different roles. With The Verdict, he decided to take some chances. He used to say the public wouldn't come to see him do something like that."
She paused again as she seemed to be thinking back.
"There has been a going back and rehashing of old problems. Going back and picking up some things. Scars carried with you for fifteen years."
Yes, scars. Her scars and his scars. The scars her father inadvertently left on her. And the scars his father inadvertently left on him.
Paul Newman, whose father did not want him to become an actor, always played the kind of he-men his father seemed to want him to be. He was always trying to please his father. Always trying to make the team. But in his new movie, he is not trying to make the team anymore. And he seems to be coming to terms with trying to win the approval of a father who has been dead for a generation.
As the filming of The Verdict was winding down, the cast and crew began to talk about what they were going to do next. Even Paul Newman and Sidney Lumet. They sat in the jury box one day — with juror-serious faces — passing judgment on a new script. The screenwriter, whose first screen-play was being dissected and criticized, was Paul Newman.
Actually, Newman cowrote the script with his friend Ron Buck, a Los Angeles restaurateur. The screenplay is tentatively titled Harry and Son.
The story is about a son who wants to be a writer and a father who wants his boy to do something more practical. It reads like a fictionalized version of Paul Newman's conflict with his own father. Writing is substituted for acting, but the quarrel between art and a steady job remains essentially the same.
In one scene, the father (Harry) comes in and finds his son busy at his portable typewriter.
FATHER: Don't you get sick of all those rejection slips?
SON: Hemingway was rejected ninety-seven times before he was published.
FATHER: And now you're out to break his record.
The son gets up from his typewriter.
SON: Can I get you somethin', Pa?
FATHER: Yeah. A job.
SON: What?
FATHER: You can get a job...that's what you can get for me. I want you to look for a job tomorrow. A real job.
Son [later]: I don't want to spend a whole lifetime working at something that pisses me off.
It is as though, by casting their relationship as a story and writing it, Paul Newman is trying to expiate the guilt he feels about having gone against his father's wishes. And in a movie, he can give the story the ending he wished it had had in real life.
In the script, the father lives to see his son's success. A check for $1500 arrives as payment for a story the son has written about his father.
FATHER: Maybe...maybe I'm not too old to learn.
It is classic wish fulfillment, which most people confine to their dreams but which writers put down on paper. Paul Newman was able to write the speech his father never said to him.
And Newman, in an early version of the script, even gave the story one more turn.
SON: Hi, Pa. You writin' a letter?
FATHER: Story.
SON: A what!? How's it going?
FATHER: Slowly. But it's going.I feel like a man who's lost his shoes...
Paul Newman, the barefoot superstar turned barefoot screenwriter, finally wrote the ultimate, longed-for, wish-fulfillment, too-good-for-this-world sign of perfect paternal approval. The storythe father is writing is about his son. And Newman is able to kick off some of his guilt along with his shoes.
Paul Newman will do this father-and-son movie next. Besides cowriting the script, he will also direct and star in it. So, in a sense, he will be playing his own father and will be giving himself absolution.
Of course, this movie would have to be entered as evidence in the imaginary trial of Paul Newman that I have been conducting. Mark it "exhibit G."
The prosecution rests.
NEWMAN: Wait a minute. This trial isn't over yet. How about you? Don't you ever feel guilty about anything?
ME: Well, I sometimes feel a little guilty when I sense myself really beginning to like someone I'm writing about. I'm afraid I'm mellowing.
NEWMAN: How do you feel about this piece? How do you plead?
ME: Guilty.
[From Issue 387 — January 20, 1983]