Newman on Oscars, car racing, marriage
Editor's note: What follows is a reprint of an interview with Paul Newman by Daily Herald Firm Critic Dann Gire. The article ran on Dec. 3, 1982, just as "The Verdict" was to be released.
BOSTON - Paul Newman was driving reporters buggy.
The star of "Cool Hand Luke" and "Absence of Malice" would begin to answer a question, suddenly stop talking, then roll his blue eyes to the ceiling.
He would freeze in this position, staring thoughtfully, while a small group of journalists eagerly hovered around him in an anticipatory spell like those eavesdropping opportunities from the E.F. Hutton TV commercials.
The people with notepads and tape recorders asked themselves the same question: Is that it, or is there more of the answer coming?
Pretty soon, most of Newman's small audience recognized the pattern. When he was thrashing out the final segment of a reply, the eyes went for the ceiling. When his answer was complete and he was ready to tackle something new, he brought his eyes to bear on his most recent interrogator.
That wasn't an altogether bad thing. Women have been known to accost Paul Newman on the street just for a glimpse of those luminous orbs of sex appeal that the actor usually conceals from public view with sunglasses.
He removed his tinted wire-rims as he sat at a conference table, one of several where stars and producers from the upcoming motion picture "The Verdict" met with the press and talked up their product. Fortunately, no one had asked the actor to take off his shades. They would have been in big trouble.
"There's nothing that's designed to make somebody feel more like a piece of meat than some chick coming up and saying, 'Take off your dark glasses because we want to take a look at your baby blues.' People wonder why I get offended by that," Newman said.
"What do they expect your reaction to be? Am I supposed to look soulfully at them? Or do I give them just a peek, a flash? Really, it's such a ridiculous position to be put in. I said to one woman, 'Sure lady, I'll taken them off, if you let me inspect your gums.'"
His listeners broke up at the unexpected display of vulgar honesty from the man with the distinguished cap of graying hair. Newman, dressed in a sharp three-piece suit, went back to staring at the ceiling, a habit that was slowly driving a couple of overanxious press people bonkers. But that was the Newman style, unassuming but reserved, polite but distanced.
By reputation, Newman generally avoids interviews with journalists, each of whom invariably attempts to discover and dissect "the man behind the baby blues." But to Newman the actor, "The Verdict" was a movie for which even he could tolerate the nation's press buzzing around him like hyperactive workers crawling all over a queen bee.
"The Verdict" is a skillful reworking of the old "man seeking redemption" theme that crops up now and again on the late show. Newman plays a scraggly alcoholic attorney named Frank Galvin. Once a top-notch attorney in Boston, he married into a rich and influential family. But when his personal ethics conflicted with the system, he rebelled. For his idealism, he paid with his job, his wife, his faith and self-esteem.
Years later, Galvin has a chance to make amends and reclaim his self-respect by pursuing a hospital negligence lawsuit despite overwhelming odds. Jack Warden plays Newman's partner and mentor. James Mason stars as Newman's formidable adversary, the attorney retained by the Catholic Church on behalf of the hospital.
"The Verdict" is directed by Sidney Lument, who, along with Lawrence Kasdan ("Body Heat"), was the most overlooked director in the 1981 Oscar race. Lumet's films include the equally overlooked "Prince of the City," as well as "Serpico," "Network" and "Deathtrap" from earlier this year.
"The Verdict" has a turbulent history. It has gone through four directors and at one time was supposed to star Robert Redford (who had even been considered as a director himself). The role of Frank Galvin had been a coveted commodity with names as big as Frank Sinatra's being tossed around for consideration.
But the part went to Newman, who is obviously being groomed by 20th Century-Fox as a shoo-in for his sixth Academy Award nomination. His previous nominations for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "The Hustler" (1961), "Hud" (1963), "Cool Hand Luke" (1967) and "Absence of Malice" (1981) have never yielded the golden statuette. In fact, he's not sure he even wants it just now.
Someone posed a hypothetical question to Newman. What if he got the Oscar for "The Verdict"?
"There's half of me that would say 'Whoopee!' and the other half wishes I would get the award when I'm 83. Save it," Newman said.
"I'm not skeptical of Oscars. I just think it's so hard to weigh apples and oranges. There are too many things that go into creating a performance to say this person was better at it than another person. That's why I'm not competitive about acting.
"That's what's so gratifying about racing. If you're the first across the finish line, that determines who wins. It's like watching my daughter ride horses. A judge gets up there with 160 kids in the class and marks them one, two, three, four, five, six. How can he do that? I feel the same way about people who take a whole series of films and say one, two, three, four, five. I don't know how they can do that."
Among the other topics covered in quick succession at the press conference:
•His successful (and second) marriage to actress Joanne Woodward since 1958. Someone wanted to know how the Newmans had managed to stay together in an industry notorious for marital failures. The actor's response was dramatically metaphoric.
"Someone once asked me to define myself in terms of a dog. I thought of a terrier," he said. "I remembered one terrier when he was just a puppy. He was just a little guy, and he was faced with this bone about that big, a real shank of a ham. He took about a week and a half, but, by God, if he didn't worry that thing right down to the nub. I'm a terrier, I guess.
"Joanne and I really work at not letting distractions get in the way. I think it's probably a lot easier in the long run to throw the jacket away and get a new one. But we've had too much fund. We've had a lot of grief, a lot of respect. She's a mercurial lady, and I never know who I'm going to wake up with. It's been an experience, I'll tell you."
•Racing, which has become Newman's alternate passion. He's earned a solid reputation behind the wheel of a race car, having set track records nationwide and taken second place along with two teammates in the 1979 "24 Hours of LeMans."
"Joanne has an interesting story about (my racing)," he said. "She thinks I was getting just a little bit bored, not just with acting but bored with quality of scripts, projects, what television has done to the popular appetites while reaching the lowest common denominator. She thinks - you'll notice I'm hiding behind her skirts, right? - that the kind of hanging it all out racing has bled into how I fell about acting. Hanging it all out doesn't seem to be as threatening as it used to be."
•The quality of movie scripts, which Newman charges, has not gotten any better in Hollywood.
"I used to spend 15 percent of my reading time going through scripts 20 years ago," he said. "Now I spend about 85 percent of my time reading scripts, which is a great pain in the ha-ha.
"If I had only done those scripts which I had been crawling the walls to do, I would probably work once every four years. But I don't think you can maintain a fine tune as an actor if you work every four years any more than you can be a great painter and paint every four years. An actor's got to work. You do the best that you can with what's out there."
•Nuclear disarmament, which Newman has advocated for many years. In 1978, he served as U.S. delegate to a United Nations conference on disarmament. A few days before the November election, he and fellow actor Charlton Heston squared off on ABC-TV's "Last Word" for a quickie debate of the nuclear issue. Now, the White House has charged the nuclear freeze movement has been infiltrated by the Soviet KGB, an accusation that Amuses Newman.
Newman reasoned that because the freeze has been supported by prominent military figures, CIA Director William Colby and many scientists, "it would seem as though the freeze movement has been more infiltrated by Americans of questionable authority than by the KGB. It is fun and games I must say."
•"Newman's Own Salad Dressing," a personal oil-and-vinegar dressing recipe that the actor is marketing through his company, Salad King. "Newman's Own" has sold more than 400,000 bottles, the profits of which benefit various charities and personal causes.
Newman considers his venture into food marketing "a rocket in my life" and said people can expect "Newman's Own Industrial Strength Venetian Spaghetti Sauce" to hit the grocery shelves in the near future.
One subject left untouched was the 1978 death of Newman's only son, Allan Scott, killed by a lethal combination of alcohol and tranquilizers. From that unhappy event in his life, Newman gained another worthy cause to support. At a recent celebrity auction, Newman purchased a single item for a $40,000 donation to an anti-drug organization.
At age 57, Neman still carries a star's charisma packed in an athletic physique. Time has thinned the hair a little, put a few well earned lines in his face and added a bit of padding around the belt, but the eyes continue to radiate that careful balance of intelligence and mischievousness partly responsible for his professional success since his first Broadway appearance ("Picnic") in 1953.
Time has given Newman something else, a pictorial history of his growth as an actor. he admitted he sees his earlier works once in a while on the late show. His response is always the same.
"Yechh!" he said.
"I've always been a slow starter. I've never been able to learn anything all that quickly, whether it was racing, skiing, hockey, trombone or acting. I just wish that I had realized much earlier to just depend on what I was doing.
"I'm not saying I hate all the movies, but, like in 'The Hustler,' to go back and see that is very painful for me now. I realize I really didn't have to work that hard. It was all there. I just emphasized it too much."
<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Stories</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=238705">Paul Newman's films</a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=238742">Schaumburg woman recalls Newman</a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=238741">Dann Gire: Newman, known for those eyes, remembered for his heart</a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=238737">Lincolnshire racing team mourns loss</a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=238736">1982 interview: Newman on Oscars, car racing, marriage</a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=238776">Reaction to Paul Newman's death</a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=238777">Newman on Newman</a></li> </ul> <h2>Video</h2> <ul class="video"> <li><a href="/multimedia/?category=1&type=video&item=204">Paul Newman in Chicago </a></li> </ul> <div class="moreSubHead"> Slideshow </div> <ul class="moreGallery"> <li><a href="/multimedia/?category=1&type=slideshow&item=24" class="mediaItem">Paul Newman </a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>