Paul Newman was not one for celebrity worship
Posted on Sunday, October 5, 2008
You aren’t supposed to get
star-struck in this job.
Just because you ride in
an elevator with LeBron James or Julia Roberts doesn’t mean you’ve had a moment with them, nor does the fact of their fame diminish their humanity. There are reasons that people become stars—at the very least they have the knack of effortlessly enlisting the empathy of strangers —but few of them have actual superpowers. Yet how could an American of my generation and background not feel a frisson of excitement upon meeting Paul Newman ? He seems to have been the last of his kind, the last of the genuine movie stars from the time when movies mattered in a way they no longer can. He was in the same league as Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and Gregory Peck—with Ted Williams and Hank Aaron. He was the exemplification of a particular kind of masculinity, one of the private heroes against which a young man might measure himself.
You grow up, you learn that there is not that much difference between you and those you admire or detestthe human spectrum is broad but limited and it is possible to be noble in one minute and craven the next. That Newman was mortal is obvious to us now that he is gone, but there is a part of me that wants my illusions intact.
When I met Newman six years ago he was an old man very much aware of his effect on his public and the journalists who’d gathered in Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton ballroom to hear him answer questions. Newman was there to promote Road to Perdition, a Depression-era gangster film that stars Tom Hanks as a hitman on the run from Newman’s Irish mob pater familias, which he sheepishly admitted he hadn’t yet seen.
Not that it mattered. The real point of the occasion was an audience with Paul Newman, a chance to examine, reasonably close up, those arctic blue eyes.
And they were that blue. Bluer even. They blasted at you from an ancient man, a Socratic figure, mildly stooped and maybe pretending to be just a bit befuddled, with comic hesitancy meant to misdirect his audience from a keen, predatory intelligence lurking just beneath the patina of Hollywood bonhomie.
He glanced at the microphonestrewn dais where he was meant to sit.
“It looks like somebody’s ready to declare war,” he said. Then he slowly turned around to regard the posters hanging behind him. “Could I have my salad dressing thing up here too ? If we’re going to peddle stuff, we might as well peddle the spaghetti sauce too.”
And so it went for about the next 45 minutes. Paul Newman wasn’t so much like Reggie Dunlap or Frank Galvin as he was an impish, avuncular comedian, albeit a dignified one who refused to gladly suffer fools. He turned aside a question about his son Scott, who’d died of a drug overdose in 1978 (Newman founded the Scott Newman Center for drug abuse prevention in his son’s memory ) with a withering “That was a long time ago.”
Later, a journalist wondered aloud if the world mightn’t be better off if more “celebrities” would follow Newman’s philanthropic model. He seemed genuinely irritated by the question, and answered with real heat:
“This is not a ‘celebrity’ issue. This is a political issue, it is simply a human issue—those who have more than enough ought to be willing to help those who don’t have enough. I am confounded by the stinginess of some institutions and some people—there’s only so much stuff you can buy, only so much you can put in your closets. In 1987, the average CEO’s salary against someone working in his factory was 70 times. Now it’s 410 times. If you eliminate the middle class in this country, which we are slowly doing, incidentally...”
Newman seemed to catch himself, to remember where he was and to whom he was talking.
“Aristotle said the greatest government is the government that has the least number of people at each end. That makes sense. I don’t think there’s anything exceptional or noble about being philanthropic—what I don’t understand, what I consider unnatural, is the opposite inclination.”
When I wrote about Newman six years ago, I said it seemed like he had taken in the entire room, that he probably knew exactly where the exits were and how many steps it would take to reach them. He was wizened but alert, and as shocking as it was to see him old he still had that unnamable quality that made him Paul Newman, even if his corporeal presence didn’t conform with the movie star in our head.
As a young actor he had a cockiness, an air of self-assurance that often manifested itself in an insouciant brazenness—as a kid Newman often played a charming, insolent jerk barely capable of concealing his contempt for the straight world. He was easy to like, even when the characters he played—feckless Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler, bullheaded Luke Jackson in Cool Hand Luke—were petty and mean. Despite the rumors, it’s difficult to imagine Butch Cassidy as a senior citizen.
Newman was the method actor who didn’t seem to take himself too seriously, who didn’t so obviously and painfully draw from a well of real or imagined neuroses. Even when his characters were dysfunctional, they seemed capable of balancing checkbooks and of negotiating an ordinary day without cutting themselves to shreds on reality’s sharp edges. Newman was always the most unhurriedthe most unfrenzied—of movie actors, and as such was often underrated.
Though Newman might have been the most important movie star of the ’ 50 s and ’ 60 s, my own personal Newman is from the late 1970 s and early 1980 s: specifically the Newman of the five years bookended by 1977 ’s Slap Shot and 1982 ’s The Verdict. We might think of this as Newman’s period of transition from leading man to featured legend, but his work in these roles invariably elevated what could have been ordinary material to the level of genuine Hollywood art. Newman was a great actor before that run—which also includes Absence of Malice and Fort Apache the Bronx—but this was when I, for reasons that have to do with my own coming of age and moviegoing habits, recognized that greatness. When the moderator called time and Newman climbed down from behind the microphone, he smiled and waded down into a swarm of journalists who’d momentarily forgotten they were not supposed to be star-struck. They pushed pens and press kits in his direction, which he signed, they stuck out their hands, which he shook. They leaned into him and he cocked his head to listen. The last time I saw Paul Newman, he had his hand on someone’s shoulder. He was smiling and his eyes were dancing. Maybe looking for an exit.
pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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