Paul Newman (47 page)

That said, Joanne always claimed that Walter Bridge was the nearest role Newman ever played to his own true self. Newman disagreed, but when he described the character he was, in fact, speaking in terms
that he recognized deeply: “Walter Bridge is a man of extraordinary ethical and moral values. A patriot. He has great loyalties. He adores his wife, and he’s disturbed by the fact that he isn’t more outgoing and can’t tell her how much he adores her.”

They shot first in Paris, then in Kansas City, and then for a brief spell in Ottawa. And the Newmans were particularly keen on a project that so vividly recalled their own childhoods and backgrounds. Merchant and his production team were sticklers for period details to the point that they raided the homes of Connell and his sister for family heirlooms with which to decorate the sets. Ivory, who grew up comfortably in Klamath Falls, Oregon, spoke often with his stars of how much the setting and tone of Connell’s story reminded them all of their own early lives. “It’s the only film I’ve ever made that was about my own childhood and adolescence,” he said. “When we talked about it, that seemed true of Paul and Joanne too.”

The director didn’t allow nostalgia to soften his demands when it came to work, however, insisting that his young script supervisor, Lisa Krueger, correct Newman when he kept swapping a
which
for a
that
in a particular line. Terrified, she did as she was told and made known to the actor about his mistake. (“It builds character,” Ivory had assured her.) Newman gave her a look and replied that he would fix the mistake “if you’re lucky”—and complied in all subsequent takes.

In fact, he was terrifically supportive of the film, as he proved when Merchant and Ivory ran into hassles with their distributors, Miramax, whose notoriously bullying boss, Harvey Weinstein, threatened to withhold payments for completion of the film unless they shortened it. As Ivory remembered, “We told Paul what was happening, and Paul got on the phone to Harvey and said, ‘Lay off and pay ’em,’ so they did.”

T
HE RESPONSES
to this spate of work varied.
Fat Man
was barely given a release by Paramount and was savaged by critics en route to one of the lowest box office returns of the year;
Blaze
was released amid a cloud of hullabaloo and fared slightly better with both audiences and critics, who once again found Newman’s rascality fetching;
Bridge
achieved modest commercial success—it was never treated as anything
more than a delicate art film—and was received with warmth, in the main, by critics; as a bonus, the film yielded an Oscar nomination for Joanne, her first in seventeen years. But even that little laurel didn’t convince Newman to keep hanging around film sets: After
Bridge
he took another three-year hiatus from movie work.

Not that he missed the activity. In May he stood on a dais in Bronxville, New York, and gave a speech to the 286 graduating members of the Sarah Lawrence class of 1990, which included Clea and Joanne, who had finally finished her B.A. He shared some wise words and some jokes at his own expense. He had dreamed the night before, he said, of being scolded by a woman for “hanging on to the coattails of the accomplishments of your wife,” and he made sure to leaven all his wisdom with the caveat that “actors tend to bathe in baloney.” But he was a sincerely proud father and spouse and seemed not to mind being photographed in his mortarboard and academic robe. The school had become such a part of the family, in fact—Lissy had graduated two years earlier—that Newman presented a check the following year for $1 million to endow the Joanne Woodward Chair in Public Policy.

From there he jetted almost immediately to Indianapolis, where Michael Andretti, Mario’s son, would be driving for Newman-Haas in the Indy 500. For all the races Newman and his teams had won over the years, he still hadn’t drunk from the traditional bottle of milk in the winner’s circle at Indy. In 1987 Michael Andretti was leading with a lap and a half to go when a valve spring snapped and his engine died. Two years later he had another engine blow out while he was leading the race. Newman didn’t necessarily love the event itself—“The more people there are, the more difficult it is for me to get around,” he told a journalist—but the atmosphere of the race was unequaled, as was the prestige of winning it. So he kept coming back.

He wasn’t racing so much as he used to himself, in part because he was running into tight spots and little accidents more frequently than he had at any time since he first started. Indeed, he had gravitated toward another pursuit—backyard badminton, which he played with competitive relish, whether against one of his daughters or against
such perennial nemeses as politicians Tom Downey, Marty Russo, and Charles Schumer and actor James Naughton. He was so cutthroat, in fact, that he demanded that the championship of the Hamptons summer season be played not in the open air, where wind currents could unfairly affect the outcome, but inside a high school gymnasium that he rented out for the purpose.

W
HILE HE
played and raced and sold food products and built camps and avoided the acting work that he’d pursued for nearly five decades, laurels came to him. In 1991 the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute honored Newman and Joanne with one of its Four Freedoms Medals, citing their charitable endeavors in awarding them the Freedom from Want prize.

The following year the couple was granted an even splashier recognition by being among the recipients of Kennedy Center Honors, the nation’s highest cultural award. Their peers in that fifteenth class of honorees were jazz musician and educator Lionel Hampton, dancer and actress Ginger Rogers, cellist and composer Mstislav Rostropovich, and dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor. In an end-of-the-year gala in Washington the Newmans sat with President George H. W. Bush and his wife in a box at the Kennedy Center as they were lauded from the stage by Sally Field and Robert Redford and serenaded by a group of children who had attended Hole in the Wall camps over the years. “It’s so heady,” Joanne admitted. “It’s a little unreal.” Newman, downplaying himself as ever, simply declared the evening “stylish and civilized.”

Inside him still, though, was that Peck’s Bad Boy just itching to get out. In the summer of 1993, when his fellow Westporter David Letterman moved his talk show from NBC and Rockefeller Center to CBS and the refurbished Ed Sullivan Theater off Times Square, Newman took part in a delicious prank. Hiding in the audience, he stood up during Letterman’s introductory monologue and growled, as if confused, “Where the hell are the singing cats?” He pulled some tickets out of his jacket, announced he was in the wrong
theater, and walked out of the place, while Letterman gazed on as if taken by surprise.
*

That same spirit of anarchic fun seemed to govern his next choice of film project, an unlikely meeting of minds between him and the savantlike darlings of American independent filmmaking, Ethan and Joel Coen, whose cultish little hits would seem to have nothing to do with the high-gloss stuff Newman had been making since the 1950s. The Coens were following up their Cannes Film Festival–winning
Barton Fink
with
The Hudsucker Proxy
, another story about a schnook sucked into something bigger than himself. It was the tale of Norville Barnes, a gormless Indiana business school graduate who finds himself suddenly running a huge New York company after its managers have realized that they need a patsy figurehead as part of a convoluted scheme to manipulate the price of their stock. As Barnes, the Coens cast Tim Robbins, the lanky, curly-haired, bulb-nosed goofball from Ron Shelton’s
Bull Durham—
and an outspoken political liberal whom Newman knew from the New York activist scene. Newman would play Sidney Mussburger, the ruthless, cigar-chomping Machiavel who’s convinced he’s found the perfect putz, only to watch helplessly as Barnes’s idiotic moneymaking idea—a circular tube “for kids”—turns out, in fact, to be a moneymaker.

It was a juicy part filled with broad, gruff, angry comedy—unlike anything Newman had ever done before. And Newman, not quite clear how anyone had imagined him playing it, asked the Coens point-blank why they had thought of him. “We were stumped,” the brothers admitted. (They have a way of finishing sentences for each other that makes transcribing interviews with them a bizarre sort of puzzle). “It’s not that we’ve seen him in anything else close to this. There are certain ineffable
qualities about actors that come to mind, and he responded immediately to the humor in the role. Maybe he was intrigued to be the bad guy.” In fact, Newman said that he saw Mussburger in an altogether different light. “I think he’s a hero,” he said. “Every character every actor plays has to be the hero.”

The film, budgeted at more than $25 million and produced for Warner Bros. by the action-movie meister Joel Silver, shot in the winter of 1992–93 in Wilmington, North Carolina, where the producer Dino De Laurentiis had built soundstages. The sets were enormous and stylized in a kind of fever dream version of Art Deco, evoking the era of screwball comedy epitomized by such directors as Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, and Frank Capra. “Paul walked onto the set,” Ethan Coen recalled, “and he said it was the biggest he’d seen since
The Silver Chalice”—
a joke that Newman could afford to make. It was neither his money nor his reputation on line with the film, after all. “What’s the downside of this?” he asked rhetorically. “That I’m booted out of the Hollywood fraternity and [become] unhirable? So? And then what?”

In fact, he found that making the film was a blast. The Coens asked all sorts of physical stuff from him: hanging from gravity boots, breaking through windows, stripping to the waist for a massage, and so forth, and he rose to the challenges with glee—and, it has to be said, with a remarkably lean and sculpted physique for a man who had just celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday. Whatever it was the Coens had, he seemed to catch it and keep up with them stride for stride. “I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with that original a bunch of guys,” he marveled later on.

The film wasn’t released for almost a year after it wrapped—the Coens hadn’t made such a costly film before and had fights on their hands over the question of test screenings and edits to accommodate audience preferences. And as with many Coen films, the initial response was muted in part because there was no easy way to categorize the thing. It puzzled critics out of the box, and Warner Bros. had no idea how to market it; the $2.8 million gross
—$2.8 million!—
was the lowest for any film of Newman’s since
Quintet
, although like so many other Coen brothers pictures,
Hudsucker
would acquire a larger audience over time.

ON HIS
sixty-ninth birthday, January 25, 1994, the phone rang in Westport. It was Arthur Hiller, the film director and, at the time, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was calling to let Newman know that he had been selected by Academy officers to be honored with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, for “an individual in the motion picture industry whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry,” at the Oscar ceremony in March. After decades of being overlooked or overtaken in Academy Award sweepstakes, he would be picking up his third statuette in nine years. And he would be doing so at a time when he was expanding the business that fed his charitable efforts
and
working on a film that would have Oscar voters thinking about him all over again.

As had been the case for decades, he was turning down more chances to make movies—some of which became quite successful for other actors—than he was actually appearing in. In the years between projects, he had passed on the chance to appear in Roman Polanski’s
Death and the Maiden
, Ron Howard’s
The Paper
, Steve Zaillian’s
A Civil Action
, Sydney Pollack’s
The Firm
, Richard Donner’s
Maverick
, and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s
A Thousand Acres.
Robert Redford wanted him to play the role of literary scholar Mark Van Doren in his film
Quiz Show
, but Newman demurred, explaining, “I would have been struggling with that patrician quality. You can take the kid out of Ohio, but you can’t take Ohio out of the kid.” (Paul Scofield eventually took the role and had no such problems.) He had talks with Merchant and Ivory about appearing in an adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel
Diary of a Mad Old Man
and with John Guare about starring in and directing a mystery entitled
Stark Truth.
And he was still pursuing
The Homesman
, his road-show western, with a new script by Naomi Foner, as well as the much-talked-of
Rachel, Rachel
sequel in collaboration with Stewart Stern.

But the picture that he actually made was one that came to him from Robert Benton, whom he’d come close to working with more than twenty years earlier on the unrealized film
The Tin Lizzie Troop.
Benton had been selected by producer Scott Rudin to write and direct a film version of
Nobody’s Fool
, a homey, character-driven story by novelist
Richard Russo about a small upstate New York town that’s home to Donald Sullivan, a ne’er-do-well handyman offered a chance at personal redemption during a holiday visit from his estranged son, whose own career and marriage have sputtered into failure.

As Benton recalled, he was only thirty or so pages into the book when he called Rudin back and said, “This would be a perfect part for Paul Newman, and when I write it, I’m going to write it for him, and I’d like him to be the first person we go to see with it.” But that idea caught Russo by surprise. Sully, as the main character was known, was in his view a seedier and slighter man than Newman. “My first thought,” Russo remembered, “was that my Sully wasn’t a great-looking guy. I thought of him as a Don Quixote—Don Sullivan. So when I heard it would be Paul Newman, my reaction was, ‘Well, I can see why they’re doing that to guarantee the success of the movie, but that’s not my Sully.’”

Benton, though, had always been thinking of Newman. “I had Newman in mind for every line I wrote,” he recalled. “I tailored it to him, and I don’t know what I’d have done if he’d said no.” As it happened, Newman’s quick yes put the picture on the fast track, Russo remembered, and drew money and talent to the project.