The outsider insider

Interview, March, 1998 by Graham Fuller

Yet the man himself, and the deeper actor inside him, is much more about thorny, disruptive independence than establishment flag-waving

First the eyes: wary, quizzical, and, of course, piercing. The hair is thinner and more silvery than in its heyday, when Paul Newman resembled a young All-American Caesar. But at seventy-three, he stands as lean and straight as a pale. Never a big man, or an especially agile one, he reminds me - as he ushers me into the lounge/pool room in the basement of his and Joanne Woodward's Upper East Side apartment house - that, with his gruff charm and inarguable authority, he never needed to be physically daunting.

Here's a theory: Newman was always a terrific star - a star's star - but he wasn't a great actor until he hit middle age. As brashness and insouciance fell away, he matured into a marvelously irascible postmenopausal man. His range was still lengthening in his sixties: from snorting comedy in Blaze (1989) to grim implacability in the otherwise tedious Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) to sixtysomething obstreperousness in Nobody's Fool (1994). Now, in his latest film, Twilight, he brings immense weariness to his portrayal of a washed-up L.A. gumshoe. Age is something Newman wears well.

That's not to dispute that in the 1960s he was the preeminent male icon of American movies, with only Steve McQueen as a rival. But there was nothing reassuring about Newman's image - how many other virile, barnstorming leading men have given themselves so readily to sham, bluster, skepticism, and suspicion? Newman is central to the idea of troubled masculinity in Hollywood cinema, and to the fragility of its artifice. How perceptive of Robert Altman to cast him as that pioneering showbiz charlatan William F. Cody in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976). And how brilliantly evasive Newman is in the film. In truth, the offscreen Newman - a vocal, liberal, independent-minded New Yorker of some asperity - is a much more comforting figure.

"We could play pool," he ventures with a glint after he's shaken my hand. But since I don't want to be hustled by the man who was twice Fast Eddie Felson, I turn the tape recorder on instead.

PAUL NEWMAN: [eyes tape recorder] When we were doing The Left-Handed Gun [1958], I lived in a bunkhouse for about a week, chased cows. There was a young kid there who I really wanted to get on tape. He was so shy, he wouldn't do anything. Finally, after about a half a bottle of Jack Daniels, he loosened up [laughs] and I set the tape recorder down in front of him. He started to say a sentence, but then stopped fight in the middle and said: "I cain't talk to nothin' that don't talk back." And that was the end of it. Those were the only words I ever got from him.

GRAHAM FULLER: And then you turned the recorder off and he talked and talked?

PN: Yeah, he talked and talked.

GF: It happens a lot in interviews. Why did you decide to become an actor in the first place?

PN: I'd done some acting in high school. Then I went to Kenyon College [Gambler, Ohio] and got thrown in jail and kicked off the football team. Since I was determined not to study very much, I majored in theater the last two years. Got my degree in speech; they didn't actually have a degree in theater. I graduated at two o'clock in the afternoon, and at three-thirty I was on the train for Williams Bay, Wisconsin, for summer stock, and then I did winter stock. Then my father died, and I came back to Cleveland and worked in his sporting goods store for about a year. Then I went to Yale for a year.

I didn't have anything to run for that really grabbed me, except what I happened to be doing, which was the theater. It wasn't as though I really made a commitment to it; there wasn't anything else around. So I wasn't driven to become an actor - it just seemed to be the thing that I managed to do best.

GF: Once you came to New York, you did a lot of live television.

PN: The first thing I did was a play, Picnic [1953], which ran for fourteen months and made me solvent. It was just luck and being in the right place at the right time, looking a certain way. I don't think I knew an awful lot.

GF: Was it doing the live television shows, however, or stagework that convinced you that you could act, in the sense that it began to flow naturally for you?

PN: I figured that out about five, six years ago. [laughs] I know it's going to sound disingenuous, but I don't think I was comfortable watching performances of mine until . . . yes, five or six years ago. Maybe a little earlier.

GF: Was The Hustler [1961] a pivotal experience for you?

PN: It was luck. I'd been shooting a film [Paris Blues, 1961] in France, and I was supposed to follow it up with another film, which fell through. I think Robert Rossen [director of The Hustler] had actually signed somebody else to play Fast Eddie, and then he found out I was available, and called me and said, "Can I send you a script?" I read half of it, and called my New York agent at six o'clock in the morning and said, "Get me this film." And he did, but if the other one had worked out, I would have had to do it. So, again, I keep reiterating, it's about being in the right place at the right time, and I really have to acknowledge that. As far as The Hustler is concerned, it was probably important in that it gave me a lot of confidence. Working with Rossen was wonderful. I can't remember changing a single line in the script once we got it, though Rossen did add one scene.