Paul Newman (49 page)

Despite the fact that he had pushed past seventy, Newman did some of the stunts that the script called for. Schreiber learned of Newman’s dedication to the material immediately upon working with him. “It was my first day on set,” he recalled, “and they put the coat on me and they said, ‘Okay, Liev, this is Paul. Paul, Liev.’ ‘How you doing?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Now, kick him in the head.’ Ugh. So I kicked him in the head. Of course, he’s Paul Newman, and he goes, ‘Harder! Kick me harder!’
‘I don’t want to kick you harder.’ ‘Kick me harder!’ It was terrible…I’d much rather have Paul Newman beat me up than the other way around.” Having made his young costar nervous with his Methodish dedication to the film, Newman disarmed him even further one day when Joanne visited the set. “He put his arm around my shoulder,” Schreiber recalled, “and said to me, ‘Will you look at the ass on her?’”

He had similar fun with Channing. One of the ongoing jokes in the script was the scuttlebutt around the police department that Ross had been shot in the groin and could no longer fulfill his manly duties. Channing played a detective and potential love interest, a take-charge gal who flat-out sticks a hand down Ross’s trousers to find out if the rumor is true. At first blush she wasn’t keen on the scene. “I didn’t go to Harvard to stick my hand down a man’s pants,” she complained to Benton. “Yes, but it’s Paul Newman’s pants,” he replied. A trouper, she went ahead. “Paul didn’t say a word,” she recalled, “while Robert kept telling me to ‘Reach deeper, deeper!’ But finally [Paul] whispered in my ear, ‘Let me know when you strike oil!’”

Despite a dream cast and the reunion of the creative minds behind
Nobody’s Fool, Twilight
didn’t capture that film’s energy, charm, or level of easeful commitment. It was intended as an Oscar candidate for late 1997, but it stayed on the studio’s shelf until the spring. The reviews were respectful but inevitably compared the film to
Fool
, and
Twilight
came out the worse. Neither the ticket sales nor the awards that greeted the earlier film were equaled.

Soon afterward Newman was in Canada shooting a story about small-time bank robbers entitled
Where the Money Is.
It was something of a head-scratcher. The director, Marek Kanievska, didn’t have a terribly impressive résumé; the other actors, Linda Fiorentino and Dermot Mulroney, weren’t stars. Newman had a juicy part—a bank robber who has sidestepped a lifetime prison sentence by pretending to have a stroke and being sent to an assisted living center, only to have his secret sussed out by a suspicious nurse who blackmails him back into the robbery game. And maybe that was enough for him at this stage. “Listen, if there was more stuff out there, I would work more,” he confessed to an interviewer. “It’s dry.”

He had looked for other projects; director Jonathan Demme was
working on one with him that never came to fruition. Demme remembered a script conference that Newman brought to a halt by taking off his glasses and asking his collaborators, “Fellas, are we perfecting this thing into a failure?” So perhaps he leaped into this picture simply because it had a roguish plot (“Larceny is always fun to play,” he said), and it would afford him the challenge of portraying a man who has deteriorated physically. He went to a rehabilitation clinic in Connecticut and spent time studying poststroke paralysis with a doctor there, and he even looked into the possibility of getting Novocain injections to freeze the muscles in his face. That was nixed: “Considering how often I’d need them, the doctor was afraid there might be some damage.” He considered using makeup: false, sunken cheeks, say. Again, not a good solution. Finally, Kanievska explained, “He realized he had to trust his own inner stillness.”

That was in front of the cameras. On the set he was something of a dervish. There was a Ping-Pong table and a badminton net, and he delighted in suckering people into playing the old man for a couple of bucks, only to whip them. “You know, he really is a hustler,” Fiorentino said. “One by one he methodically destroyed everyone on the picture.”

What he couldn’t do, though, was trick the producers into getting the film into theaters. Again, the film sat on the shelf—this time for almost two years, finally being released in the spring of 2000 without making a ripple, despite affection for Newman in virtually every review.

By the time
Where the Money Is
opened, Newman had already come and gone in another unlikely role, that of Kevin Costner’s crusty, rakish dad in
Message in a Bottle
, based on the lugubrious best-selling romantic novel by Nicholas Sparks. In some ways the pairing of Newman and Costner was natural, if belated; there had been a time when Costner seemed a potential heir to Newman’s throne as the screen’s casually roguish superstar. But the younger man’s career had waned precipitously after his late-1980s hits, and he hadn’t aged with anything like the grace or beauty that Newman still possessed. His audience, which had once compared him to Newman, had thinned. That didn’t matter, evidently, to Newman, who didn’t see it as his job to carry the picture. Joking that he would play the titular bottle, he said, “I haven’t done a lot of films where I didn’t have to carry the film. And
that was nice. That was a relief, to know that the whole thing wasn’t completely on my shoulders.”

Would that it had been. The picture was more or less reviled by critics, who, as with
Where the Money Is
, took special notice of Newman’s work as an isolated bit of quality. “Paul Newman handles his role… with the relaxed confidence of Michael Jordan shooting free throws in your driveway,” wrote Roger Ebert in a representative notice. The film actually grossed more than any Newman film since
The Color of Money.
But it didn’t stop Costner’s continued slide. And Newman clearly had involved himself for the pleasure of it, not for the potential reward.

Better by far was his brief, self-mocking turn in an episode of
The Simpsons.
His fleeting appearance came after housewife Marge Simpson makes her husband, Homer, jealous by revealing that she has a crush on the cartoon lumberjack pictured on a package of paper towels. That night Homer dreams of a romance of his own with a character from a logo. A bottle of Newman’s Own salad dressing appears to him, and Newman’s familiar face suddenly becomes animated, declaring, in the unmistakable gravel of his late-life voice, “Homer, I’ll tell you what I told Redford: it ain’t gonna happen.”

W
HEN HE
had gone out of his way for the producers to do some publicity for
Where the Money Is
, he confessed to reporters, “I just get restless, and the best thing that happens to be around at that time, I’ve got to do it.” He was thinking about retiring—“I’d like to find a film I could bow out on”—but none of the projects he had been making would seem to serve adequately as the final grace note to a career of such unprecedented length, breadth, and quality. Finally, in 2001, the right job presented itself.

Road to Perdition
was a searingly violent graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner dealing with deceit and revenge among the members of a midwestern crime mob in the 1930s. It focused on Michael Sullivan, a paid killer whose life is imperiled when his young son stows away in the family car and witnesses him at his bloody work. Connor Rooney, the shiftless son of crime boss John
Rooney, decides that Sullivan and his boy must die, but he botches the job and inadvertently kills the boy’s brother and mother instead. Sullivan then dedicates himself to avenging his slain wife and son while protecting the one boy he has left.

The story, adapted for the screen by the English director Sam Mendes, would shoot in Chicago in the winter and spring of 2001. Tom Hanks would play against type as Sullivan, Daniel Craig would play the unreliable Connor Rooney, Stanley Tucci took the role of Chicago gangster Frank Nitti, Jude Law was Maguire, a hit man on Sullivan’s tail invented newly for the film, and Newman would play John Rooney in a part much expanded from the original.

Mendes had gone to Newman’s apartment overlooking Central Park for a luncheon meeting to see if they could work together. “He shuffled about and made great play of the fact that he was becoming old and forgetful,” the director recalled, “but I got the sense he was watching me like a hawk.” After asking a lot of questions about the character’s wardrobe, temperament, and background, Newman had one final query of Mendes: “You any good at holding hands?” Mendes said yes. “Then let’s do it,” Newman replied.

“There was something so comforting about getting on an airplane to come to Chicago to know that you’re going to start shooting a film with people like this,” Newman said later. “This guy Mendes has to be dealt with. He has a brilliant mind in terms of storytelling. You expect him to be good with actors, from his stage experience. But he has that artist’s eye with the camera. Not only as an artist but as a storyteller.”

Newman and Hanks had never met before—although Joanne had played Hanks’s mother in
Philadelphia
and they had competed in the Oscar derby in the year of
Nobody’s Fool
and
Forrest Gump.
Despite the thirty-plus-year difference in their ages and their distinct approaches to their work, they hit it off. Hanks admitted that he was initially awed by his costar. “Paul can do anything he wants,” he said. “If he wants to call me ‘kid’ and never learn my name, fine. If he wants to do one take and walk away, fine. If he wants to come in with two little lapdogs and talk to them all day long, he could have done that too.” He especially treasured homey memories of Newman on the set. “He had corned beef and cabbage on Saint Patrick’s Day while watching a replay of the
Talladega 500,” he recalled. He cherished the image of Newman calling Joanne between shots and the memory of Newman confessing to first-day jitters.

Speaking in tandem to a reporter, the two stars described their rapport in jocular but fond terms that actually revealed something about their joint process:

Newman: “We respected each other’s isolation. We didn’t do a lot of stuff before scenes.”

Hanks: “It was like playing catch—but he was way over there.” Newman: “We respected each other’s territory. He pissed on his tree, and I pissed on my tree, and then someone yelled ‘action!’”

Hanks: “We were two dogs snarling at each other, and our chains only went so far.”

Inevitably, Newman sported himself on the set: twice Mendes was shocked to find him walking on his hands to amuse the two boys who were cast as Hanks’s sons. But he had done some homework for the role, asking the writer Frank McCourt to record his lines for him so that he could study an Irish accent and brushing up on his piano playing for a scene in which Rooney and Sullivan bond over the keyboard. (Originally the scene asked for the two actors to dance, but Newman told the filmmakers, “Go and look in my wife’s closet and check her shoes, and you will know immediately that I can’t dance.”)

For all the joking, Newman was, Mendes remembered, still a very precise and analytical actor. “He wants to know, partly because he feels shaky now with lines sometimes, exactly what I want from him,” he said. “He’ll talk about the placing of a full stop or a comma.” At one moment Newman was frustrated with his dialogue and asked Mendes if he could change the word
where
to the word
here.
“We changed one letter,” according to Mendes, “and he was thrilled. He said, ‘That’s much better. What a relief. Now I can do something with it.’ He’s that particular.”

In another scene, Mendes recalled, Newman was meant to chew out Craig, only to stop halfway through his tirade and hug him. Newman had a different idea: “Paul had this very clear image, a physical image, of what he wanted to do. He wanted to hit [Craig] so hard that he knocked him to the ground, then pick him up so he could hit him
again, only to end up embracing him. The important things are the things that are not articulated, just dramatized.”

The film was photographed by Conrad Hall, who had worked with Newman on
Harper, Cool Hand Luke
, and
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, but not since. Hall found Newman to be “the same identical person” as he had been decades earlier. Except in one respect: Once, Mendes recalled, as they were preparing to shoot Newman, “I turned around to find that Conrad was crying as he lit the shot. I asked him what was wrong, and he just said, ‘He was so beautiful.’ And I said, ‘Well, he’s beautiful now.’ And Conrad repeated, ‘Yes, but he was so beautiful.’” Later, more composed, Hall observed that Newman “saves the best part of his performance for the close-up. As an actor and a director, he knows how important that part of the performance is for him. So he gives his all.”
*

N
EWMAN SPENT
only two weeks on the film—plus, to the studio’s financial woe, a couple of days. A clause in his contract calling for an additional $250,000 for his time kicked in. “He made the studio pay for the extra two days and then gave it straight to his charity,” Mendes recalled. When shooting finally ended in June 2001, the intention was for an Oscar-season release. But Mendes, making only his second film, hadn’t yet arrived at a satisfactory cut. So it was pushed back to the summer of the following year, an unlikely release date for a film with such dark themes, no sex, no comedy, no special effects, and not even, given how many deaths it contained, much blood.

The decision to release it as a bit of counterprogramming to the summer’s usual menu of fluff paid off in ticket sales—over $100 million, Newman’s first such gate in three decades—and very positive reviews. “It’s a genteel film with a gun in its pocket,” wrote Michael
Wilmington in the
Chicago Tribune
, “but it’s also a film with a universal chord of feeling that keeps welling up from the dark surfaces.” In the
Los Angeles Times
, Kenneth Turan said, “Because it is so careful with its effects, this film’s ability to create feeling sneaks up and surprises. This is a story with a will to move us and the ability to do whatever it takes to make that happen.” Mick LaSalle in the
San Francisco Chronicle
added, “Not much is on the surface of Newman’s performance, yet every moment is alive with what’s underneath it—the weight of a misspent life, of guilt, of the certainty of damnation.”