In KC, Paul Newman was just a regular guy
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Some movie stars spend most of their energy cultivating that stardom.
Paul Newman wasn’t one of those.
Newman, who died Friday at age 83, was a movie star, all right. One of the biggest.
But he seemed mildly embarrassed by his celebrity. Notoriety was useful in pushing his philanthropic and political causes, but other than that he would have been happy to spend his life in blessed anonymity.
I got to spend a little time with Newman in the fall of 1989 when he and wife Joanne Woodward were in Kansas City filming “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge.”
What I observed was a 64-year-old man utterly at ease with his movie co-workers and reluctant to acknowledge his fame. At one point as I watched him move around the set — practically unnoticed by his fellow moviemakers — he was approached from behind by a middle-aged makeup lady. She threw her arms around him.
Newman screwed up his face as if deep in thought and then announced, “Bo Derek?” The makeup lady laughed and let go of the man millions of other women had dreamed of holding.
Local folk serving as crew members described an actor who would sometimes sneak away from the camera and lights to hang out with them as they painted scenery or fiddled with props.
He’s just real down-to-earth,” one told me at the time. “He honestly doesn’t understand why anyone would make a fuss over him.
I met with Newman in his RV parked on a downtown street, just outside a building on West 10th where a set representing Mr. Bridge’s law office had been built.
Dressed in the immaculately tailored but generic three-piece suit that was Mr. Bridge’s uniform, Newman greeted me at the door and quickly cleared a table of newspapers and fast-food detritus. He shunted to the side a large stack of paperwork — reports on his charitable enterprises which, he wryly noted, ate up much more of his time than acting did.
The trailer, I decided, had the ambience of a college dorm room.
Early in the interview a production assistant arrived to announce that there had been a change in plans and that the suit Newman was wearing would have to be replaced by one in another color.
Newman gave a What are you going to do? shrug and retreated to a bedroom at the back of the RV, calling out answers to my questions and periodically venturing forth in various stages of undress. At one point he emerged in only a T-shirt and white briefs. The photographer who accompanied me, a young woman, was too stunned to take a picture. I’ve since concluded that when you act for a living, personal modesty is one of the first things to go.
Newman, an avowed liberal, might have been an odd choice to play Walter Bridge, a Depression-era lawyer, rock-ribbed Republican and devout conservative.
I asked him at the time if he saw the emotionally constipated Walter Bridge as a bad guy.
“Of course not,” he said. “I’ve done villains — Hud was a real villain. 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.
“But a villain? Well, not in his own eyes.
“The older I get, the more I realize that the light you think you’re radiating is not the light other people see when they look at you. I wonder how Al Capone felt about himself as he looked in the mirror in the privacy of his own bathroom. I’m sure he thought of himself as a very human guy.”
On the set, Newman conferred briefly with director James Ivory and cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts about the upcoming scene. They talked about where to place the camera; it was suggested that the best angle would be from the very spot where a large leather sofa now rested.
Immediately several cast and crew members surrounded the heavy piece of furniture and wrestled it out of the way.
One of them was Paul Newman: Oscar winner, sex symbol, race car driver, major-league philanthropist and — from what I could deduce in our brief time together — a very good guy.
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