Paul Newman (42 page)

As an actor, he felt he’d finally come of age. “Until eight or nine years ago it wasn’t organic,” he said of his own work. But more recently, he explained, he had come to a wiser understanding of his craft: “In the last, I don’t know, four or five years, I’ve just tried to make the character come to me, to find the elements of the character that are part of my personality and incorporate them. If you go back and see the early films, you can always see the machinery and the disconnection between me and the character. You see the actor working. But after a while, instead of working your way up every canyon and every crevice, you know how to get rid of all this peripheral stuff that you’re not going to use anyway. You don’t waste as much time.”

In fact, the idea of Newman’s being sixty made people realize that his time was a precious commodity. In October the Screen Actors Guild presented Newman and Joanne with its most prestigious honor, a life achievement award, and there was talk around Hollywood of finally enshrining him in the even more exclusive pantheon he’d been denied access to for nearly thirty years. Late in the year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences approached him, through Warren Cowan, to ask if he would be willing to accept an honorary award for his life’s work at the Oscar ceremony the following March. It was one of those backhanded honors: having ignored or forgotten or overlooked or skipped him six or more times, they were trying to make amends while he was still hale enough to walk up to the podium and make a speech.

He had joked about not winning an Oscar until his extreme dotage: “They’ll carry me out on a stretcher and I’ll reach my wizened hand out from the coverlet and grab it.” Now, he felt, they were trying to put him on that stretcher before he needed it.

Besides, how could they honor him for his career when his career wasn’t even over?

Hell, he had found another script worth shooting.

T
HINKING BACK ON
BUTCH
CASSIDY
AND THE
SUNDANCE KID
, Newman sighed. “It’s too bad they got killed in the end, ’cause those two guys could have gone on in films forever.” Of course, as the ongoing failure to follow up
The Sting
with a third Newman-Redford picture showed, he might have had an aversion to repeating a role. Indeed, he often declared his frustration with scripts that reminded him too much of things he’d done before: “Wherever I look, I find parts that are reminiscent of Luke or Hud or Fast Eddie. Christ, I played those parts once and parts of them more than once. It’s not only dangerous to repeat yourself, it’s goddamned tiresome.”

That said, he had returned to the role of Lew Harper in
The Drowning Pool.
And he was convinced in 1984 or so that there was a good reason to go back even further to an early, crucial moment in his career: Walter Tevis had written
The Color of Money
, a sequel to
The Hustler
, concerning the later life of Fast Eddie Felson. It was a tale of maturity, the gaining of wisdom and empathy, and small-scale redemption. It fit the mold of films Newman had most recently been making. He decided to see if there wasn’t a script waiting to be teased out of it.

He had a director in mind. A couple of years earlier he’d been so blown away by
Raging Bull
, the extraordinary boxing film starring Actors Studio member Robert De Niro and directed by Martin Scorsese, that he took the remarkable step of writing Scorsese a fan letter. (He addressed it, alas, to “Michael.”) He took in Scorsese’s newest
film, the dark, offbeat comedy
After Hours
, and got in touch with the director again, asking if he’d be interested in working on a film about the middle-aged Fast Eddie. Scorsese, a feverish movie buff who’d grown up watching Newman, agreed to have a look at the script.

It was, Scorsese felt, too like the novel—which, in his view, meant staid and static and dull. Tevis (who had died after writing the book) had turned Felson into a pool-hall operator who has a romance with a college English professor. Scorsese, who had a much more vivid sense of darkness and redemption even than Tevis, felt that it was likelier that Fast Eddie would turn into a version of Bert, the evil, manipulative fixer played by George C. Scott in the original film. He passed the project along to a writer who he thought would help them realize a really pithy version of the story.

Richard Price was a novelist
(The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers)
who had been tapping on the windowpane of the movie business for a while and had been working on updating the film noir
Night and the City
for
Raging Bull
producer Irwin Winkler. Scorsese had no interest in that project, but he admired Price’s work and thought he would provide an angle on the Fast Eddie story that would make a better film than would a faithful adaptation of Tevis’s novel. Price was delighted with the opportunity—“Finally I would get to work with someone my mother had heard of,” he said—and he and Scorsese flew to California to meet with Newman, who was living in Malibu.

“We’re sitting there on the porch,” Scorsese remembered. “Too bright. I’ve got on a blue blazer, jeans, sunglasses. Richard’s all hunched over. Y’know, we’re these two New York scuzzballs. And Newman’s out in the sun in a bathing suit and he says, ‘Come on out.’ And he’s saying things like, ‘You know, this morning I got in the shower and ate an Israeli melon.’ And Richard is looking at me as if to say, ‘What is he talking about?’ I don’t know what he’s talking about. Does he realize he’s talking to two New York Lower East Side–type guys? Israeli melons? He’s talking about a sensuality we have no idea about. We were lucky if the showers were working.”

Cultural identities aside, Newman agreed to give Scorsese and Price’s version of the story a hearing and then proceed to a treatment. Price produced an eight-page outline of a new script and submitted it
to Newman, who admired it but threw up his hands. “Fellas,” Price recalled him saying, “this is not me. I can’t do this. This is too grim and dark and down.” He agreed, though, to see if they couldn’t all steer it toward some happy medium. The three would meet and discuss some scenes and ideas, and then Price and Scorsese would go off to work the changes that the meeting had suggested. “As I kept telling Richard,” Scorsese said, “‘We’re making a three-piece suit for the man. He’s the main character and the reason we’re involved in this thing. He’s got to look a certain way, and the words have to come through his vocal cords.’”

They spent about a year, on and off, working out a script they could all live with—a story in which Fast Eddie would discover a young version of himself to mold and manipulate. Newman, Price recalled, would read his work with care and then often, and always respectfully, find another way to do it. “Sometimes Newman would say, ‘Guys, I think we’re missing an opportunity here,’” he recalled. “And the minute I heard that, I would groan, ‘Oh, no, here we go again.’ Unfortunately, he was rarely wrong. But there were points when I thought, ‘If I hear, “We’re missing an opportunity” one more time, you’re gonna be missing a writer.’”

They were keen on experimenting—Newman called the writing process “as good a communal experience as I’ve ever had”—and even tried to work Minnesota Fats into the script so that Jackie Gleason could make an appearance. (Approached, Gleason demurred, said Scorsese, because he felt his role was “an afterthought.”) Finally, script in hand, they went to 20th Century–Fox, which had made
The Hustler
, with the project. The studio passed. But a newer studio, Touchstone, which was run by Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, early champions of Scorsese, was interested. The problem was, Touchstone was a division of Walt Disney Studios, and Newman had no interest in being in business with them, not even with the portion of the studio that made grown-up fare. Eisner managed to convince him that the studio wouldn’t interfere with Scorsese, and the film was green-lit with a budget of more than $14 million. (Newman and Scorsese each pledged one-third of their fees as guarantees against running over budget.)

Part of the reason that Touchstone—which based its business model on making films for less than $10 million—was willing to spend more than usual was that Newman, Scorsese, and Michael Ovitz (who would soon start to represent the director) had managed to secure a hot young star to play Vincent Lauria, the untutored hotshot whom Eddie finds and polishes. Tom Cruise had actually auditioned for the role that Robby Benson played in
Harry & Son
and been passed over (“I saved your career, kid,” Newman told him later); now he was a rising star and had a tremendous hit on its way into theaters, a picture about navy pilots called
Top Gun.
With the premier sex symbols of two generations and one of the most respected directors in the world on board, Eisner and Katzenberg weren’t exactly betting a long shot.

That said, though, they were still very anxious about the film. “That was one of the few pictures they went out on a limb for,” recalled Peter McAlevey, who worked at Disney as a development executive at the time. “Jeff Katzenberg was scared of the picture, and they didn’t want to do it at first. But Martin Scorsese wrote an impassioned personal letter to him from his heart of hearts, and Katzenberg didn’t want to walk away from him.” So the picture went ahead, with a few provisos: one was that everyone was working for less than their usual price; another was that Newman would have to make special arrangements to get to the Chicago sets each weekend. “Normally the star would come in on the morning of the shoot, on Monday,” McAlevey explained. “But Katzenberg made Newman agree to fly in from Connecticut each weekend on Sunday morning because they were shooting in the winter in Chicago, and O’Hare Airport was liable to be shut down a certain number of days during the shoot.”

At Newman’s insistence, as per usual, the actors and the director and, for a time, Price met for two weeks of rehearsal before shooting began. Once production proper began, Newman was immensely impressed with Scorsese’s command of the technical aspects of directing. “Everything was comprehensively prepared,” Newman remembered. “I thought, ‘My God, how long do you have? Ten weeks?’ We had 392 set-ups. We were able to do it because the planning was so complete.”

But Newman was also taken with the way Scorsese would coax depths out of his actors. “Scorsese’s got an incredible eye,” he said.
“You just don’t get away with anything—he’s on you
like a hawk.
You can’t fall back on inaccessible mannerisms. He would hesitate, kind of creep over like a crab, and I would say, ‘Spit it out!’ I couldn’t quarrel. He’d be right on.” With even so fine a performance as the one he gave in
The Verdict
fresh in his mind, Newman felt he was finding a new level of quality and commitment in collaboration with Scorsese. “I keep thinking of him as a siren on the rocks,” he told a reporter, “constantly beckoning. Every once in a while you’d crash, a couple of times you’d sink, and he grabs you by the hair and asks, ‘You okay?’”

By all accounts, it was an immensely pleasurable production. Newman and Cruise both did most of the billiard shooting in the film themselves after taking a course with Mike Sigel, then the world’s top straight pool player; they developed a friendly rivalry in games played for small stakes. They constantly teased each other on the set, Cruise calling Newman “Gramps” and Newman calling him “Kid” or “Cruiser” and telling him to go get his diaper changed. On Newman’s sixty-first birthday he was fêted by the producers; Cruise presented him with a garter belt and a bra from a local sex shop. The two sneaked off for a weekend so that Newman could teach the kid a little about race-car driving.

Newman genuinely enjoyed working in Chicago, which had a big-city feel but none of the distracting fripperies of New York or Los Angeles. At one point Stewart Stern came to visit him, and the two went for a postprandial constitutional. “We were walking through a blizzard,” Stern recalled. “He said, ‘Oh, God, I love this town. Think how far we’ve come and nobody has stopped me.’ ‘But Paul,’ I said, ‘we haven’t passed anyone for fourteen blocks!’”

Indeed, he was so happy there that he stayed in town on the night of March 24, when Sally Field stood at the podium of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles and presented him with an honorary Oscar “in recognition of his many memorable and compelling screen performances and for his personal integrity and dedication to his craft.” It was, Academy president Robert Wise noted, “an honor long overdue for one of the screen’s most versatile and dynamic performers.” Newman spoke to the assembled crowd and the massive television audience via satellite. “I’m especially grateful that this does not
come wrapped in a gift certificate to Forest Lawn,” he said. “Tonight has provided a lot of nourishment and a kind of permission to risk and maybe surprise myself a little bit in the hope that my best work is down the pike in front of me and not in back of me.”

W
HEN IT
appeared in theaters in October 1986,
The Color of Money
was received warmly by both critics and audiences. Grossing more than $50 million, it was Scorsese’s biggest hit to that time, and it was a media sensation.
Life
magazine put out two different covers with a photo of Newman and Cruise lying on a pool table head to head, their bodies pointed in opposite directions; each half of the run of issues had a different actor face up and the other upside down.

And then there were the reviews: Paul Attanasio, writing in the
Washington Post
, declared, “Newman’s confidence in his own instincts gives Fast Eddie a remarkable gravity, so that Newman can accomplish with the slightest of intonations, or the choice of a simple prop (like the tinted glasses he wears), or an almost indetectable shift in his eyes, what would take another actor the course of a movie to attain.” Roger Ebert, slightly drunk on expectations, was underwhelmed by the film as a whole but nevertheless acknowledged, “In many of Newman’s close-ups in this movie, he shows an enormous power, a concentration and focus of his essence as an actor.” The
New York Times
ran a glowing review by Vincent Canby (“Mr. Newman appears to be having a ball…a wonderfully funny, canny performance”) and followed it with an equally appreciative essay by Janet Maslin (“[Newman] brings the weight of a moral victory in a man’s struggle to regain his faith and proficiency”).

Newman should have been luxuriating in all of this, but instead he found himself embroiled in a public pissing contest with his old archnemesis, the
New York Post.
It began with a harmless little joke in a
New York Times
profile intended to draw attention to
Money.
The writer, Maureen Dowd, related an anecdote from Gore Vidal, who said that he had heard echoes of his old friend Newman’s fame in the unlikeliest of places, namely the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. “This KGB agent from the Foreign Ministry who was following me around
asked if he could see me privately because he had something very special to talk about,” Vidal said. “When we were alone, he whispered, ‘How tall is Paul Newman really?’” Cute. Later on in the story Dowd provided the answer, describing Newman as “a lean 5 foot 11”: more or less what every article and official bio of him ever stated.