TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/82/82newman

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Paul Newman: Verdict on a Superstar

December 6, 1982

Paul Newman wins in auto racing, salad dressing and his 43rd movie

For the first scene we need underwater photography.  Very expensive,
but we're going first-class.  The opening shot is a stunner.  The
viewer doesn't know it yet, but he's looking up from inside the drain
of a bathroom sink.  Very spooky.  There's a lot of ice floating
around, seen from below, and in the middle of the Cinemascope screen
something that looks, at extreme close range, as if it might be the
hull of Titanic.  Bubbles are coming out of this ambiguous mass.
"BLUB-BLUB-BLUB-BLUB."  Tension grips the audience as the bubbling
thing, strangely facelike, rises and breaks the surface of the water.
The camera follows.  Water dribbles off the lens, and the viewer is
on the point of understanding what this goofball nonsense is all
about when the screen is obscured by masses of what looks like--
Turkish toweling?

You bet.  What we have here it not only dripping but gripping stuff,
whose essence might be summarized as:  Can a 57-year-old Westport,
Conn., salad-dressing manufacturer find satisfaction as a hot-shot
race-car driver, successful political activist, prizewinning movie
director, solid-state sex symbol, show-biz iconoclast and possibly
the most commanding male presence in films during the past three
decades?  If that sounds just a touch overheated, never fear. We have
Paul Newman to play the lead.

Can this be so?  Are you telling us that Newman, old Cool Hand Luke,
old Hud, old Butch Cassidy, old smoothie Henry Gondoroff from The
Sting, is really a salad-dressing manufacturer?  Yes, but we'll get
back to that.  The title credits are ready to roll, and our soggy
opening scene is still unresolved.  What's going on?  The facelike
apparition turns out to be a face indeed, that of Newman himself.  He
has just finished plunging his muzzle into ice water, a ritual of his
that, it is said, accounts for much of his eerie youthfulness.
Newman was 42 in 1967, for instance, when he appeared in Cool Hand
Luke, a character who looked about 28, and who would not have made
sense as a man much older than that:  he was 52 in 1977 when he
played Reggie Dunlop in Slap Shot, an over-the-hill hockey player who
looked 39 1/2.  In person now, without makeup, he might be man in his
mid-40s.

Did you actually see him do the ice-water routine?  No, dammit, tried
like hell, in fact we hid a reporter in a clothes hamper, but he got
hit in the face with a pair of pajamas just at the wrong moment.
Newman says he soaked his face in ice water and sometimes still does,
and he actually did it on the screen in Harper and The Sting.  The
story goes that he puts a rubber tube into his mouth and stays
submerged for two to three minutes (although one press account has
inflated the figure to 20 minutes).  It is the rubber tube that
sounds a bit overdone.

So there is a possibility that Newman thought up the whole business
just to con millions of middle-aged men into sticking their jowls
into ice water every morning?

You certainly can't rule it out.  There is more than a trace of
whimsicality to the man.  Assuming, of course, that it was
whimsicality that prompted him to saw George Roy Hill's desk in half
with a chain saw and to put 300 live chicks into Director Robert
Altman's trailer when they were on location with Buffalo Bill and the
Indians.

Is it time to explain about the salad dressing?

Let's have the salad after the main course.

A star is a distant incandescence, vast and mysterious.  For a mere
human being, an actor, a speaker of other people's words, a wearer of
other people's pants, eyebrows, mustaches and attitudes, to be called
a star is an absurdity.  Yet in show business a being at the level of
Paul Newman cannot simply be called a star; the term is not weighty
enough.  He becomes Reddi Wip topping with jimmies--a superstar!  Not
just your everyday vast, mysterious, distant incandescence, but a
really big one.

The distinction is very important.  It happens that Joanne Woodward,
Newman's wife of 24 years, is a star.  She is an enormously versatile
and respected actress, who won an Academy Award for The Three Faces
of Eve when she was 28.  Paul, who has never won, has been nominated
five times.  The guess here is that there is a strong possibility of
a sixth nomination for his role as a drunken lawyer in The Verdict,
which opens on Dec. 17.  She does not work very often, and she says
unworriedly that she is in a period of artistic hibernation (she will
play a part in Paul's next film, tentatively title Harry and Son).
When she does appear in a picture, knowledgeable moviegoers find out
where it is playing and go see it. Yet she can usually walk
unrecognized down a street, and her presence in a cast has never
started one of those alarming tidal movements toward the box office
that a superstar sometimes generates and in which, for reasons that
seem closer to the migration of geese than to entertainment, every
third soul on the planet decides to see a certain movie.

Matters are quite different with Newman.  His face--the nose so
straight, the eyes so blue, the lips so cruelly curled, the fine
countenance so strong and yet so vulnerable--is not just universally
recognizable.  It is almost universally a catalyst of moist and
turbulent emotions.  Men's eyes mist over, and women's knees go
wobbly.

"It was pretty bewildering when we'd go out to dinner and 300 crazed
women would approach our table," recalls Susan Newman, 29, Paul's
daughter by his first wife, Jacqueline Witte (the two have another
daughter, Stephanie, 27; their son Scott, then 28 died of an overdose
of painkillers and alcohol in 1978; and Paul and Joanne have three
daughters, Nell, 23, Lissy, 21, and Clea, 17).  Susan, who is now
close to her father but resentful of the superstar phenomenon, goes
on to say that "even in the fields of Italy, these kerchiefed people
looking over the vines would be crying `Paul-o Newman.'  It wears you
down.  It's tiring."

Author Gore Vidal, a friend since the early '50s, recalls walking
with Paul on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan a few years back.  Newman had
been holding his head down, to avoid recognition, but he raised it to
make a point in conversation.  "An extremely large woman was coming
toward us," says Vidal, "and she gave a gasp as he looked up.  We
kept going and we heard a terrible sound, and Paul said, `My God,
she's fainted.  Let's keep moving.'"

"I don't think Paul Newman really thinks he is Paul Newman in his
head," says Screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote the scripts for
Harper and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  That understates the
case.  In his head, and in as much of his life as he can control, he
insists on not being "Paul Newman."  In his first scene in The Sting,
Newman is discovered lying drunk and unshaven, with his nose mashed
against the baseboard of a crummy bathroom.  Not many of Hollywood's
firm-jawed preeners would have allowed the shot, but he has taken
pains to look as gruesome as possible.  It is an obvious mockery of
the "sex symbol" blather that makes him writhe.  He refuses to play
out the celebrity part.  He will not sign autographs because, says
his Westport buddy Writer A.E. Hotchner (Papa Hemingway), "the
majesty of the act is offensive to him."  Hotchner goes on to say,
"He is the most private man I've ever known.  He has a moat and a
drawbridge which he lets down only occasionally."  Over the years he
has amused himself, and twitted solemn Hollywood establishmentarians
who feel that superstars should have Rolls-Royces, by driving a
series of VWs hopped up with racing engines.  He and Joanne made a
point 21 years ago of exiling themselves to Westport, a woodsy exurb,
which, although prosperous and arty, had no connection to show biz.

His most effective way of expunging "Paul Newman," however, was to
become P.L. Newman (the "L." stands for Leonard), auto racer from
April through October.  He does not make movies during the summer
months.  As much as possible he does nothing but race sports cars,
although this year he also campaigned hard for the nuclear-freeze
movement.  Quite unexpectedly, after doing no racing at all until his
late 40s, he has become one of the best amateur race drivers in the
country.  Newman, say the records, has been twice national champion
in his class (and with this success has dropped the anonymous "P.L."
and now feels comfortable racing under his full name).  This year he
drove one of the fastest cars on the circuit, a $70,000, 170-m.p.h.,
turbo-charged Datsun 280ZX.

The scene:  a road-racing course for sports cars set in wooded,
rolling terrain an hour north of Atlanta.  Noise, crowds, confusion,
the racketing whine of unmuffled racing engines as drivers repeatedly
blip their throttles in anticipation of the start.  For a week now
the Sports Car Club of America has been running its national
championships here on the twisting 2 1/2-mile Road Atlanta track.
Paul has been here a week, and Joanne arrived a couple of days ago to
join him.  "We have a deal," he says.  "I trade her a couple of
ballets for a couple of races."  In fact, they enjoy each other's
company.  At a catfish restaurant near the track they argue amiably
about tenors.  She:  Placido Domingo.  He:  Luciano Pavarotti.
Joanne, a fit-looking woman of 52, whose very short hair squares off
a strong, self-contained face, says she actually likes to watch her
husband race.  "Paul likes to test himself," she says.  "That's what
makes Paul run.  He's got a lot of courage, a highly underrated
element in people's lives these days."  Says Paul:  "I enjoy the
precision of racing, harnessing something as huge and powerful as a
car and putting it as close to where you want it as you can.
Besides, it's a kick in the ass."

Friends drop by the restaurant table to jaw comfortably about cars
(Friend:  "You could put a taller gear in the rear end."  Newman:
"Yeah, but you'd screw up second gear").  The only "Paul Newman"
nonsense of the evening is harmless:  a very pretty teen-age waitress
turns pink and forgets her list of pies as she stares at Paul.  He
twists his nose goofily between thumb and forefinger and goes cross-
eyed; she turns pinker and hides her face, bubbling with giggles.
Someone tells him that he did well in an hourlong nuclear-freeze
interview for Ted Turner's Cable News Network; he is not sure.  On
the air he knows his material cold, but some instinct for humility in
the face of serious matters keeps him from injecting any show biz
into his delivery.  He can't or won't speechify, and while listeners
who agree with him nod their heads, those who don't are not
convinced.

Now, on race day, he is resting in the team motor home, driving shoes
off, blue driving suit unzipped, the neck of his white Nomex long
johns showing.  He is thin through the hips, and thinner through the
shoulders than when he played the arrogant cowboy stud Hud in an
undershirt.  He has no belly, although he drinks several can of
Budweiser a day (he has not drunk hard liquor since a boozy period at
the beginning of the '70s when he was shooting Sometimes a Great
Notion).  A daily sauna and a three-mile run seem to take care of the
beer.  His thick, curly white hair is short, his face is pink and
lightly lined, his eyes are shut.  He is driving the race in his
head, plotting how to steal tenths of a second from a Triumph TR8
driven by a rival named Ken Slagle.

A few feet away outside is a gleaming white tractor-trailer labeled
BOB SHARP RACING.  This is the team's machine shop and car van.
Sharp is a Connecticut Datsun dealer and former racing champion who
prepared the cars that Newman races. He says that Newman is faster
around the track than last year; his reflexes have not slowed.  It
took him a couple of years, but he learned how to be a winning
driver.  The other drivers quickly got over the fact that his eyes
are blue.  He has great concentration, almost a woman's delicacy,
guts enough to be good in the rain.  He's foxy, says Sharp; he'll
out-think you.

Newman appears, flashing his 1,000-watter at a kid who yells "Good
luck!" and heads off to the starting line.  He qualified his red,
white and blue No. 33 in the second row, and should be among the
leaders after the first lap.  But the spark plugs foul as the car
starts, and two plugs are changed.  By that time, it is too late to
rejoin the other cars at the front of the starting grid.  This
competition is a sprint, only 18 laps, and he seems to have no
change.

He drives a beautifully scripted race.  After six laps he has pushed
his car up to fifth.  After ten laps he passes Slagle's TR8 for
fourth place.  He is third after eleven of the 18 laps, second after
13.  He has, we learn later, broken the course record three times in
succession.  But he runs out of race, and although he is gaining
fast, at the end he is still 2.5 sec. behind Winner Doug Bethke's
Corvette.  Newman jokes with Bethke on the victory stand, puts his
arm around Joanne, smiles for the photographers, and then goes back
to the trailer to rage. Later, very seriously, he apologizes for
losing.  He does not really cheer up until the awards dinner that
night, when, looking as impish as Butch Cassidy, he succeeds in
smuggling a camera bag full of Bud past a rent-a-cop assigned to keep
alcohol out of the hall.

It takes Newman longer--seven years, he figures--to know whether his
movies are winners or not.  His acting in The Verdict is brilliant
and solid and, what is more, brilliant in the right direction.  He
plays a boozy Irish-Catholic lawyer, who is on-screen for nearly all
of the film's 125 min., accurately enough to be utterly convincing,
with enough restraint so that the audience does not get a hangover,
and sympathetically enough so that he reaches out, shakily, and
touches heroism.  Frank Galvin is a formerly bright and formerly
young Boston attorney who was railroaded out of his law firm by a
crooked senior partner.  He took to what in Boston is called the
drink and fell apart.  Galvin has had five cases in three years and
has lost four.  The fifth is what we are watching:  a suit for
damages against no less than the Archdiocese of Boston, brought by
the impoverished sister of a woman who was given the wrong anesthetic
by eminent doctors at a Catholic hospital and left in a coma.

The lawyer for the archdiocese (James Mason, who can give to a three-
piece suit more menace than was radiated by Darth Vader's armor)
suspects that the doctors blundered.  On his recommendation, the
archbishop offers Frankie's client $210,000.  "When they give you the
money it means you won," says his old legal mentor Mickey Morrissey
(a gallant old wreck superbly played by Jack Warden).  But Frankie,
without consulting his client, decides to try the case and bring the
guilty doctors to punishment.

The details of plot and motivation progress slowly and are often
unbelievable.  Director Sidney Lumet has over-directed Mason's chorus
of legal underlings, who smirk absurdly whenever he cooks up one of
his nasty stratagems.  What we are left to admire is fine, dark
photography of the brown, guilt-stained marble in the gut of a Boston
courthouse, and of Boston slush turning blue in winter twilight;
Warden's humane old counselor; and Newman.  His voice has the breathy
rasp of a drinker, his walk the uncertainty of a strong man going
down.  We see him playing pinball in a darkened bar, his shirt clean
and his tie carefully knotted; we see him tenderly embracing a
drinking lady, played wanly and sadly by Charlotte Rampling, as each
of them carefully holds a full whisky glass.

The journey to this poignant, uneven movie, through a succession of
worse and better ones, began in Cleveland Heights, a comfortable
suburb of Cleveland, where Paul was born in 1925.  He was the second
son of Arthur S. Newman, a prosperous Jewish partner in a sporting-
goods store, and Theresa Fetzer, a Hungarian-descended Catholic.  By
the time Paul and his brother Arthur, now 58, a film production
manager living in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., were children, Theresa was
a Christian Scientist.  Paul's exposure to that faith did not make
any lasting impression (he has followed no religion as an adult, but
calls himself a Jew, "because it's more of a challenge").  At 5 ft.
10 in. and 145 lbs. he is a fair-size man, but he was tiny as a boy,
and, he says, "I used to get the bejesus kicked out of me regularly
in school."  The result wasn't any artistically fruitful
psychological trauma, as far as he knows; it was that he learned to
anesthetize himself from pain.  As he observes now, "That isn't a
very valuable quality for an actor."

Acting was not important to him when he was young, but one way or
another he did a lot of it, in children's groups and high school.  He
enlisted in the Navy in the summer of 1942 but flunked the physical
because his brilliant blue eyes turned out to be color-blind.  He
ended up in the Air Corps and spent most of the next three years as a
radioman in torpedo plans and in submarine patrols off Guam, Hawaii
and Saipan.  He saw no serious combat.  He says, "I got through the
whole war on two razor blades."

At Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, he joined the student dramatic
society after being kicked off the second-string football team
because of a barroom squabble.  His drama professor, James Michael,
remembers "having trouble not casting Paul as the lead in every
play," but Newman remembers being a very bad actor.  His self-
assessment then and now is of a very slow study without much natural
talent for anything except concentration and tenacity.  "I was
terrorized by the emotional requirements of being an actor," he
recalls.  "Acting is like letting your pants down:  you're exposed."

After graduating from Kenyon in 1949, he spent a season doing summer
stock in Williams Bay, Wis.  The following year he moved to
Woodstock, Ill., joined the Woodstock Players, met Actress Jacqueline
Witte and married.  He had appeared in 17 Players productions by May
of 1950, when the news came that his father had died. With Jackie, by
then pregnant with their son Scott, he returned to Shaker Heights to
become a salesman in the store.

There was a family echo here.  Arthur Newman, "a brilliant, erudite
man" with "a marvelous, whimsical sense of humor," at 17 had been the
youngest reporter ever hired by the Cleveland Press, Paul says, but
he had quit to go into the family business.  Newman is
uncharacteristically subdued in recalling his father:  "I think he
always thought of me as pretty much of a lightweight.  He treated me
like he was disappointed in me a lot of the time, and he had every
right to be.  It has been one of the great agonies of my life that he
could never know.  I wanted desperately to show him that somehow,
somewhere along the line I could cut the mustard.  And I never got a
chance, never got a chance."

Paul was set free when his family decided to sell the store.  In
September 1951, with Jackie and Scott, he headed toward New Haven to
enroll in the Yale University School of Drama.  "I wasn't driven to
acting by any inner compulsion," says Newman, who was 26 then; "I was
running away from the sporting goods business.

He was 27, and things were going well for him.  Before the opening of
Picnic, he had been promoted to a supporting role and had got
excellent notices.  He was studying with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan
at the prestigious Actors Studio (with, among others, Geraldine Page,
Rod Steiger and James Dean).  Then Warner Bros. offered him a long-
term movie contract starting at $1,000 a week.  Abruptly he found
himself wearing what he called a "cocktail gown" and playing a Greek
slave named Basil in a religious costume saga, The Silver Chalice.
It was the sort of absurdity that Virginia Mayo used to appear in,
and she was in it.  Newman, who is self-conscious about his bony
legs, was so abashed that, as he points out now with some glee, he
refused to look at the camera.  When what is referred to in Newman
family lore as the Worse Picture Ever Made played in a weeklong run
on television in Los Angeles some years ago, he took out a large ad
in the Los Angeles Times:  PAUL NEWMAN APOLOGIZES EVERY NIGHT THIS
WEEK.  He got hold of a print and showed it to friends in the
screening room of his Westport home not long ago, supplying everyone
with a metal pot and a large wooden spoon to beat on it with.  "It
was fun for about the first reel," he said, "and then the awfulness
of the thing took over."

The Hustler, made in 1961 by Director Robert Rossen, was among the
first of a handful of Newman films that have become American
folklore.  Newman recalls wandering into a disco a few years ago and
shooting a few games of pool.  A kid walked up to him and said, "Mr.
Newman, I've seen The Hustler four times, and watching you shoot pool
is one of the biggest disappointments of my life."  The kid had just
seen Davy Crockett shoot himself in the foot.

Fast Eddie, the pool shooter who told Jackie Gleason's Minnesota
Fats, "I'm the best you've ever seen, Fats, I'm the best there is,"
is all speed and charm and thin-ice cockiness.  Hud Bannon, the surly
cowboy womanizer who is the turbulence at the center of Martin Ritt's
1963 film Hud, seems twice the size of Fast Eddie.  He is a brawler
with the looks of a fallen angel, and he sneers at emotion:  "My
mother loved me but she died."  Hud is rotten.  He is trying to have
his father declared incompetent so he can sell his ranch to oilmen.
But Newman gave him a crooked, loser-winner smile that caught at the
heart, and although the script didn't really justify it, he was a
scape-grace hero.

These miscreants are not just part of our culture now but almost part
of our national character:  the hero as romantic screw-up, the loner
crabbed by society and usually, despite his looks, not very lucky
with women.  The purest and most consistent of these Newman voices is
the sweet-natured convict hero of Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke,
released in 1967.  Luke is not very bright, but he is an original,
and the scene in which he brags that he can eat 50 eggs, and then
proves it, is marvelous comedy.  There is a powerful sadness when
fumblingly he plays Plastic Jesus on the banjo after his mother's
death and when he is ground to his inevitable death by the vicious
prison system, the waste of a gentle man.

The loner as enchanted loon appeared next.  Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid and The Sting, two improbabilities directed by George
Roy Hill, should not have worked, but they flew like butterflies.
The entire joke of Cassidy is that two boyish and harmless train
robbers, Newman and Robert Redford, arouse the anger of the railroad
boss, who to their pained astonishment sends real detectives after
them.  The lovely conceit of The Sting is that several dozen
swindlers will band together to wreak intricate vengeance on a
villain who has killed one of their tribe.  Neither film can bear
analysis; as with a butterfly, you can see the wings, but where is
the engine?  No matter.  When Redford and Newman jump off the cliff
in Cassidy, and when Newman and Robert Shaw cheat each other at draw
poker in The Sting, the audience knows it has died and gone to
heaven.

George Roy Hill, who directed it, has no reluctance in calling The
Sting's poker scene "one of the best pieces of comedic acting I've
ever seen.  I defy any actor to play that scene better."
Screenwriter Goldman says that Newman "could be called a victim of
the Cary Grant syndrome.  He makes it look so easy, and he looks so
wonderful, that everybody assumes he isn't acting."

Win some, lose some.  How can you take seriously an industry whose
three biggest draws a few years ago, says Newman, were "two robots
and a shark"?  And if moviemaking goes numb, as it is bound to do
sometimes, maybe salad dressing will draw a smile from the gods.
Newman is the sort of man who questions his acting ability, but is
sure he makes the world's best salad dressing.  He always makes his
own in restaurants, which, come to think of it, is a fairly gaudy
stunt for a man who does not like to attract attention.  Years ago,
at the posh Chasen's restaurant in Los Angeles--"It was one of our
first stylish meals out," says Joanne, rolling her eyes at the
memory--"he took an already oiled salad to the men's room washed it
clean, dried it with towels and returned to the table to do things
right, with oil cut by a dash of water."

Probably because Hollywood is sure to consider it revoltingly tacky,
he has begun manufacturing the stuff as Newman's Own Olive Oil and
Vinegar Dressing (Appellatin Newman Controlee), with a sketch of Paul
right there on the bottle.  His collaborators are his Connecticut
friends Photographer Steven Colhoun, Hotchner and Hotchner's wife
Ursula.  The conspirators are threatening to go into organically
grown popcorn, popcorn being another of Newman's passions, and
something tentatively called Newman's Own Industrial Strength
Venetian Spaghetti Sauce.  Profits will go to educational funds,
consumer groups and the Scott Newman Foundation, an organization set
up to promote accurate portrayal of the drug problem in films and on
television.

There is a touch of elaborate fantasy about the salad-dressing
venture and, for two people whose reality is Hollywood, a suggestion
of make-believe to the contented exiles in Westport.  For years Paul
and Joanne lived beside the small, tumbling Aspetuck River, where
Paul would break the ice and splash on winter mornings after his
sauna.  They have another house in Beverly Hills and an apartment in
an East Side Manhattan hotel.  In the summer of 1981, keeping their
former house for the use of whichever daughters happened by, they
moved across the river to a small, 1736 farmhouse.  They have an
apple orchard, a swimming pool, eleven acres of fields and woods, and
a refinished barn used as a guesthouse and screening room.  They have
cats, dogs and an expensively renovated stable half an hour away that
Paul swears he will have memorialized in an oil painting showing a
huge hole into which beautiful people are throwing money.  They have
a piano that Paul, a lover of Bach (he urges his sportscar friends to
buy Glenn Bould's new digital recording of the Goldberg Variations),
has learned to play fairly well.

They have a marriage.  A few years ago, when he was filming in
Hawaii, Paul handed Joanne a box with a new evening gown in it.  When
she had changed, they were flown to a deserted golf course where they
were served an elegant dinner alone beside the sea, serenaded by a
string quartet.  A superstar's easy gesture; what says more is that
after 2 1/2 decades he describes her, with great relish, as a
"voluptuary."

On the wall of their kitchen is a sampler, which Paul had made to
commemorate a remark by Joanne "that seemed appropriate at the time."
It says "I will regulate my life.  JWN."  The sampler shows a lit
light bulb and an exploding cannon:  husband's view of wife's
character.  Since then Joanne has attended est sessions and resolved
to stop "choosing to be in Paul's shadow" and to stop apologizing for
being what she calls "a creative dilettante."  Says she:  "As I look
back, I think what I really wanted was to have a life with no
children, but I was raised in a generation that taught us otherwise.
I felt very torn at times, lured away by the satisfaction of acting,
which is a worthy thing, and by my sense of ambition, which isn't.
Acclaim is the false aspect of the job, which screws you up.  You
start to need it, like a drug, and in the final analysis, what does
it all mean?  I won my Academy Award when I was very young, and it
was exciting for five or ten minutes.  Sitting in bed afterward and
drinking my Ovaltine, I said to Paul, `Is that it?'  Now I think
being a full-time parent would be O.K. with me.  With what I've
learned, I'd enjoy it a lot more."  Though she isn't interested in
playing "mother roles" in films, she remains a mother, who, in a
competitive, talented family, had the difficult job this fall of
convincing their 17-year-old daughter Clea that a mediocre
performance at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden was
not the end of the world.

When Paul is traveling, he calls Joanne every day, and when they are
in Westport he will break off a conversation to say, "I want to see
my lady."  Fifteen years ago, he decided that his first try at
directing would be Joanne's film Rachel, Rachel.  The film is a
gentle and perceptive look at a spinster schoolteacher awakening in
her 35th year.  "Paul has a sense of real adoration for what Joanne
can do," adds the film's writer Stewart Stern.  "He's constantly
trying to provide a setting where the world can see what he sees in
her."  He has directed her twice since then, in The Effect of Gamma
Rays on Man-in-the-Moon  Marigolds  and The Shadow Box.  In the first
of these, their pretty blond daughter Nell (then 13, now 23) played
opposite Joanne.

Paul says that he loves directing his wife.  "Given the right parts,
she is a great actress.  She can find so many different facets of
herself to play.  Those are two different people in Rachel, Rachel,
and The Shadow Box.  That is magic."  He and Joanne also take
pleasure in acting together, says Newman.  "When we work together, we
both know we can't get away with any old tricks, because the other
one is sitting there nodding his head knowingly and saying, `Yes, I
seem to remember your doing that on the 28th page of The Helen Morgan
Story.'"  Newman, says Stern, "is very sensitive to writing, and is
the best director of actors I know.  I think there's less impediment
between his talent and its expression when he's directing.  That's
probably because, as in racing, `Paul Newman' doesn't have to be
there."

The portrayer of loners is himself a loner who likes to be with
people, but who says he has few friends.  His pal Hotchner says that
during an unproductive period in the late '70s.  Newman seemed least
glum bobbing around with him on Long Island Sound in a fishing boat
they call Cocadetoro (in fractured Spanish, bullcrap).  His bawdiness
can be spectacular; and, says Susan, she and her sisters are
constantly heading off raunchy stories with not-now-Dad looks flashed
across the room.  After years of complaining that Robert Altman's
cheap white wine tasted like goat pee, he gave the director a baby
goat, saying, "Here, now you have your own vineyard."  In a similar
mood, he once had Robert Redford's face printed on every sheet of 150
cartons of toilet paper (which, on second thought, he did not send to
Redford because the two are, as Newman says, merely "close
acquaintances").

The laughter and the jokes die, and he feels alone again.  He says he
has been a good father "in flashes," and admits that at times his
children "almost had to say a password" when they saw him to find out
whether they were considered friend or foe that day.

He is a lifelong liberal who was participating in civil rights
marches in 1963.  He speaks out on the nuclear freeze and gay rights
and why everyone should use seat belts, although he feels awkward
doing it, because he thinks he should.  After a frustrating nuclear-
freeze debate on television recently with Hollywood conservative
Charlton Heston, Newman was doubtful about his own effectiveness.
But he is an experienced campaigner, and he soon cheered up.  "I've
done better and I've done worse, but in the final analysis, it was
better than not doing anything at all."  His interest in weapons
control is longstanding; in 1978 President Carter appointed him as a
delegate to a U.N. special session on disarmament.  He recalls
feeling futile.  But being No. 19, he says, on Nixon's enemies list
made him feel fine.  He doesn't have many regrets.  Oh, he says,
maybe he wishes he were Actor Laurence Olivier or Auto Racer Mario
Andretti, "but I guess I don't wish it hard enough or fiercely
enough."

He believes strongly that "an actor should act."  There seemed to be
more good scripts when he was younger.  Maybe it's that the world has
become too bewildering for writers to come to any conclusions.  At
any rate he has written his first script with a Los Angeles friend,
Lawyer-Restaurateur Ron Buck.  He will direct and star in Harry and
Son, a story about a father's struggle to understand and control a
22-year-old son.  No, he says, Harry is not an attempt to deal with
his feelings about his son Scott, although he "definitely" intends to
make a film about Scott's death.  "We were like rubber bands," he
says, "one minute close, the next separated by an enormous and
unaccountable distance.  I don't think I'll ever escape the guilt."
As the Westport week ended a few days after the election, Newman
wondered whether the nuclear-freeze victory would have any influence
on the Reagan Administration ("Probably not") and prepared to fly to
Florida to scout locations for Harry and Son.

His friend Gore Vidal, an acute and frequently caustic observer, is
notably uncynical in his assessment of Newman:  "He has a good
character, and not many people do.  I think he would rather not do
anything wrong, whether on a moral or an artistic level.  He is what
you would call a man of conscience--not necessarily of judgment, but
of conscience.  I don't know any actors like that."  Susan Newman
considers her singular father and says with an innocent smile, "Who
knows?  None of us in the family has a handle on how Old Skinny Legs
made it."

--By John Skow.
  Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles


His Own Critic:  Newman on Newman

Asked by TIME to assess his career, Newman offered a wry and
sometimes caustic critique of a remarkable series of memorable hits
and forgotten turkeys:

The Silver Chalice (1954):  Junk.

Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956):  Had some fun with that.

The Rack (1956):  Really aspired to something, and nobody went to see
it.  A fine example of me trying too hard.

Until They Sail (1957):  Not much to play there.

The Helen Morgan Story (1957):  Ugggghhh.

The Long Hot Summer (1958):  Pretty good.  Still aware of how hard I
was working.

The Left Handed Gun (1958):  A little bit ahead of its time and a
classic in Europe.  To this day I still get $800 at the end of the
year.  Go to Paris right now, and I bet you it is playing in some
tiny theater.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958):  Pretty good film.  I'm still aware of
how hard I was working.

Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys (1958):  A situation comedy.  I was
probably weak.

The Young Philadelphians (1959):  Just kind of a cosmopolitan story
that didn't demand very much.

From the Terrace (1960):  Pretty good soap opera.  Didn't ask for a
lot.

Exodus (1960):  Chilly.

The Hustler (1961):  I had occasion to see some segments of it
recently.  Again, very conscious of working too hard, which comes
partly from lack of faith in your own talent and lack of faith that
just doing it in itself is all the audience requires.

Paris Blues (1961):  I had some fun with that.  Not that it is a
great film.

Sweet Bird of Youth (1962):  Pretty good.

Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962):  I tried to do what I
did in the TV show, and that wasn't the way to go at it.

Hud (1963):  Pretty good, again, working hard, working hard.

A New Kind of Love (1963):  Joanne read it and said, "Hey, this would
be fun to do together.  Read it.  "I read it and said, "Joanne, it's
just a bunch of one-liners."  And she said, "You son of a bitch.
I've been carting your children around, taking care of them at the
expense of my career, taking care of you and your house."  And I
said, "That is what I said.  It's a terrific script.  I can't think
of anything I'd rather do."  This is what is known as a reciprocal
trade agreement.

The Prize (1963):  A lark.

What a Way to go! (1964):  Done out of whimsy.

The Outrage (1964):  I liked that one.

Lady L (1966):  I woke up every morning and knew I wasn't cutting the
mustard.

Harper (1966):  An original character who would simply accommodate
any kind of actor's invention.  There was no way you could violate
the character; he was so loose and funky and whimsical.

Torn Curtain (1966):  Not so good.

Hombre (1967):  By then I was doing it less and enjoying it more.

Cool Hand Luke (1967):  I had great fun with that part.  I liked that
man.

The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968):  A lurch at comedy.  I didn't
accomplish it very well.

Rachel, Rachel (directed 1968):  Great fondness, great fondness.
That is a really good film.

Winning (1969):  Pretty good story about racing.  The people were not
integrated well into the racing, but pretty good.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969):  A delight.  Too bad they
got killed at the end, 'cause those two guys could have gone on in
films forever.

WUSA (1970):  A film of incredible potential, which the producer, the
director and I loused up.  We tried to make it political, and it
wasn't.

Sometimes a Great Notion (starred and directed 1971):  A much better
film than its popularity would signify.

Pocket Money (1972):  Loved the character, the script never came
together though.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (directed
1972):  I may not have been able to make the transition from stage to
film.  Too much theater and not enough cinema.  I screwed up there.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972):  Marvelous.  The first
three-quarters of the picture are classic.  We never came to grips
with the ending though.  I loved that character.

The Mackintosh Man (1973):  Thought we could make an effective
melodrama out of that, and I was wrong.

The Sting (1973):  Oh, great fun.

The Towering Inferno (1974):  Of its kind, rather good.  Get the
actors off and the stunt men on as quick as you can.

The Drowning Pool (1975):  Only time I ever played the same character
twice [Harper], and it didn't work.

Silent Movie (1976):  Just a cameo.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976):  Don't know what happened to
that one.  Made a mistake somewhere, along the line.  Great
potential.

Slap Shot (1977):  One of my favorite movies.  Unfortunately that
character is a lot closer to me than I would care to admit--vulgar,
on the skids.

Quintet (1979):  Again, made a mistake somewhere.  Director Robert
Altman is very interesting, a real explorer.

When Time Ran Out (1980):  I'm trying desperately to look the other
way.

The Shadow Box (directed for television 1980):  I take some pride in
that one.

Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981):  Some good moments, I guess.

Absence of Malice (1981):  A relatively easy part for me and
compatible with the image.

The Verdict (1982):  It was such a relief to let it all hang out in
the movie--blemishes and all.