Aging Gracefully Nearing His 70th Birthday, Paul Newman Hasn’t Worn Out His Welcome

On Jan. 26, Paul Newman will turn 70. His hair has turned white, his manner ruminative, mellower, less edgy than it used to be. Ask him how he’s doing when you run into him in a hotel elevator and he says, “Splattered,” smiling and looking anything but.

Those electrifying cobalt blue eyes still twinkle with mischief. On Broadway and in Hollywood - in roles ranging from “Sweet Bird of Youth” through “The Hustler,” “Hud,” “Harper,” “Hombre,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Verdict” and his Oscar-winning “The Color of Money” - he has been America’s longest-running rebel. When acting and directing and political activism didn’t exorcise his demons, he turned to auto racing.

Now - in life as in his new film, Robert Benton’s “Nobody’s Fool” - Newman is a rebel in twilight.

Not that he’s exactly sinking into the west in some cinematographer’s sunset. He still races cars, but five crashes in his last six races (“Somebody is giving me advice”) are sparking a renewed interest in badminton, he wryly notes.

Wry self-puncturing irony is a favorite Newman mode. He jokes that his line of salad dressings, spaghetti sauce and popcorn outgrosses his movies (making light of the fact that the proceeds support an increasing number of the Hole-in-the-Wall camps he founded to serve kids with cancer and other life-threatening diseases). He just began pre-production on a new Western he’s directing. And he’s relieved to be free of youthful handsomeness.

Being perceived as an American acting icon gives him more acting space than being viewed as a mere hunk ever did, he goes on to explain - though either term is enough to make him wince.

Newman was always entertaining in the cocky working-class-guy roles of his youth and early middle age. But since “The Verdict,” “Absence of Malice,” “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” ‘The Color of Money” and “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” he has become that rarity among American actors - the artist who has not only been permitted to age, but allowed to deepen.

These days he plays experience, not just attitude. His Fast Eddie Felson was much more interesting as a man bearing a weight of experience in the sequel to “The Hustler” than he was the first time around, when you wanted Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats to hang on for one more big win.

So it is in “Nobody’s Fool,” where he plays Sully, a wary lone wolf and sometime construction worker in a town in upstate New York, belatedly coming to grips with family ties. “I think the character gives up erratic and eccentric behavior that he thinks is male behavior in order to assume his responsibilities,” Newman says. A switch from most of Newman’s other roles, no?

“I didn’t have to work very hard on this part,” he replies, seated at a table in his suite, trying to work up interest in a salad plate. “It’s closer to me than I care to admit. That trajectory he took to go from aloof and distant and hands-off to available, involved and accessible was very close to a journey I had to take.

“This profession builds up a kind of armor. It keeps people at a distance that is required for survival. So I had enough to draw on. For a long time this guy only heard his own drummer. He was aloof and distant. Then there was this unexpected sensation when he picked (his young grandson) up out of that truck, the bed of that truck, and sat him down. That caught him unawares. And he was smart enough to honor that and to pursue and be curious about it.

“Things like that don’t happen in real life. Usually, they happen more imperceptibly, but for the uses of drama, this is OK. Does that make sense?

“The key word is unsuspecting. At some point when he was vulnerable, this unexpected sensation got a hold of him. It had to do with family, and sons, and he simply allowed it - after years of not allowing it. He didn’t invite it, he didn’t insist on it, he just allowed it to blossom, just to see what the hell the flower would look like. And then at some point, he became part of the human family. He was just standing there until his grandson landed.

“God, what a long-winded - I hope you’ll compress this! But the thing I try to say is that this veil of protection … well, you know, if your appearance is right, you can go through life being treated like an object. And when that’s amplified by the profession you join, you’d be surprised at the amount of armor that you can erect around you to protect that part of you that is sitting there, waiting around to get looked at.”

The generational traffic is two-way - or rather, partly two-way, Newman says. He will talk about his own father, who ran a sporting-goods store in Cleveland, and whose death brought Newman back from his first season of summer stock to run the store.

“He was funny, erudite, hardworking, extremely ethical - and distant,” Newman says, describing the late Arthur Newman. Was his father accessible? “Not to me he wasn’t, no.”

Until recent years, this was a pattern Newman found himself playing out as a father. He and his actress wife, Joanne Woodward - married since 1958, when they starred in “The Long Hot Summer” and the less memorable “Rally Round the Flag, Boys” - have three grown daughters. Newman has two other daughters from a first marriage; a son, Scott, died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and Valium in 1978. This prompted the griefstricken Newman to establish a charitable foundation in his son’s name.

Newman’s way is to cover his seriousness and his work ethic with self-deflating glibness, usually with an ironic curl of the lip. He jokes that he turned to acting in his junior year at Kenyon College because he was kicked off the football team after spending a night in jail following a barroom brawl, that he went to Yale for further acting study so he could escape the sporting-goods store. After clicking on Broadway, Newman writhed when he landed in Hollywood as a contract player, hoping his friends wouldn’t see him in films like “The Silver Chalice.” As soon as he could, he bought his way out of his contract.

“Work is easier now,” he says, expanding on the liberating aspects of aging. “As one wall falls down, it exposes a comfort in some area that you hadn’t explored, and it’s cumulative. I have in some ways an enviable position. I always think of stardom as a function of youth. And my age is catching up with me. Because if my success was based upon youth and appearance, then at some point” - now he chuckles at the prospect - “producers are going to have to sit up and take notice that my age is something they will not be able to disregard.”

These days, it’s not an issue that Newman and Woodward have for years lived in a remodeled 18thcentury farmhouse outside Westport, Conn., and keep a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. But many film-biz types used to whine that the couple was conspicuously setting itself apart from Hollywood.

“I don’t think we came East because we were running away from something,” he says. “I came East to go to Yale and bonded with the city pretty quickly. My wife, too. And we just lived here.

“When I go to California, people say, ‘Why don’t you live in California?’ When people come from California to New York, I don’t say, ‘Why aren’t you living in New York?’ People live where they want to be. It’s just where you happen to hook up. I happened to hook up in the East and I love it historically. It’s not a vote against any single community, it’s just a vote for someplace where you want to live. It just never occurred to me to be anywhere else.”

Speaking of voting, Newman’s longtime political activism - which began when he stuffed envelopes for Adlai Stevenson, has since sent him as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and the United Nations, and yielded a political satire, “WUSA,” about a right-wing radio station in the South - is on the back burner.

“I’m immobilized by the incoherence of it all,” he says of contemporary politics. “And the partisanship and the lack of loyalty and the self-glorification and the fact that everybody’s busy protecting their own turf. And this in a time when we need to reinvent the country. With campaign reform first and foremost. Then welfare reform, health reform, a coherent military thing, the acceptance of taxes as the price of civilization. And the return to the concept that the community is more important than the individual. I’ll make a lot of friends on this, boy. I can get assassinated on this!”

What he’d rather do is go back to writing and directing. The directing urge was stepped up, he says, when he caught himself watching his “Nobody’s Fool” costars - Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis and the late Jessica Tandy - with a director’s eye as well as an acting colleague’s. Especially Tandy, who died after filming was completed: “The most stunning thing to me was that there was never anything between you and her,” he recalls. “There were no gauzes, no shutters, nothing. Well, when you know who you are, I guess that’s pretty easy. It’s the rest of us …,” he adds, voice trailing away, feeling no need to go into detail about our imperfections.

“I’m at the point where I don’t have to worry a lot about the future. So I kind of do whatever it is that I want to. I’m not cluttered up by what I think I ought to do. I promise you there’s only one thing for sure, and that is that I have no plans. It’s whimsical, it almost always depends upon the material. And if I like it, I simply do it. I don’t care much about the consequences.”

Ask Newman what he’d like to be remembered for, and he says simply for being a man who was part of his time. He is not weighed down with regrets, he says - at least, there are fewer than if he regularly channelsurfed through his films. “I don’t like to look at them,” he says. “I keep thinking of what I shoulda done, woulda done, coulda done.”

He wishes there were more on which he and Woodward could collaborate. They haven’t appeared on screen together since “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” Having directed her in “Rachel, Rachel,” “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” “The Shadow Box” and “The Glass Menagerie,” he says they’re on the lookout for new scripts, but so far nothing has shown up.

Ask him about off-screen life with her and he says, “Most difficult - tough, cantankerous, delicious, lusty, disagreeable, fun,” with a long savoring pause between each word. “It’s a pleasant spectrum to go back over. How we make it last is correct amounts of lust and respect!”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with story: To Newman’s credit: a rich filmography “The Silver Chalice,” 1955. “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” 1956. “The Rack,” 1956. “The Helen Morgan Story,” 1957. “Until They Sail,” 1957. “The Long Hot Summer,” 1958. “The Left-Handed Gun,” 1958. “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” 1958. “Rally ‘Round the Flag Boys!” 1958. “The Young Philadelphians,” 1959. “From the Terrace,” 1960. “Exodus,” 1960. “The Hustler,” 1961. “Paris Blues,” 1961. “Sweet Bird of Youth,” 1962. “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man,” 1962. “Hud,” 1963. “A New Kind of Love,” 1963. “The Prize,” 1963. “What a Way to Go!” 1964. “The Outrage,” 1964. “Lady L,” 1965. “Harper,” 1966. “Torn Curtain,” 1966. “Hombre,” 1967. “Cool Hand Luke,” 1967. “The Secret War of Harry Frigg,” 1968. “Rachel, Rachel” (directed only). “Winning,” 1969. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” 1969. “King: A Filmed Record … Montgomery to Memphis,” 1970 (co-narrated only). “WUSA,” 1970. “They Might Be Giants,” 1971 (co-produced only). “Sometimes a Great Notion,” 1971 (also directed). “Pocket Money,” 1972. “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” 1972 (directed, produced only). “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean,” 1972. “The Mackintosh Man,” 1973. “The Sting,” 1973. “The Towering Inferno,” 1974. “The Drowning Pool,” 1975. “Silent Movie,” 1976 (cameo). “Buffalo Bill and the Indians … or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson,” 1976. “Slap Shot,” 1977. “Quintet,” 1979. “When Time Ran Out,” 1980. “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” 1981. “Absence of Malice,” 1981. “The Verdict,” 1982. “Harry and Son,” 1984 (also directed, co-produced, cowrote). “The Color of Money,” 1986. “The Glass Menagerie,” 1987 (directed only). “Fat Man and Little Boy,” 1989. “Blaze,” 1989. “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” 1990. “The Hudsucker Proxy,” 1994. “Nobody’s Fool,” 1994. The Associated Press