December 12, 1989 | Paul Newman will meet the press, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it.
It’s slightly after 9 on a battleship-gray Sunday morning in Manhattan. In a cramped meeting room on the 28th floor of the U.N. Plaza Hotel, three dozen or so critics, free-lancers and entertainment writers have been divided into five tables of inquisitors, for ”round-robin” group interviews. Newman saunters through the doorway, briefly electrifying the room with megawatt star presence.
As soon as he plops down at the first table, however, the voltage meter drifts down, way down, past indifference, near the level of amiable catatonia.
And, no, he’s not merely conserving his energy for the marathon of round-robins ahead.
Newman — ruddy faced, frankly bored, with a rumpled air despite his gray plaid suit, white shirt and red power tie — isn’t rude, exactly. But he’s not exactly thrilled to be here, and he doesn’t feel the need to disguise his discontent. I’m seated at the opposite end of the table, watching him through the thicket of tape recorders and microphone stands piled before him, and it’s a lot like seeing someone through a Radio Shack display case. It’s also a lot like seeing someone who, all things being equal, would prefer to be back in bed. Or somewhere, anywhere, else.
My first impulse is to say something on the order of, ”Hey, Paul – lighten up!” After all, the movie that Newman is here to promote, Blaze, is a good one. Set to open Wednesday in Houston, it’s a bodaciously full-bodied, exuberantly enjoyable tall tale about the notoriously eccentric Earl K. Long, one of the most outrageous of Louisiana’s many outrageous governors, and his 1959-60 romance with Blaze Starr, the flashy stripper Long introduced to friends as ”a pre-forming artist on the local cultural scene.”
Newman is terrific as the governor, attacking the role with equal measures of cracker-barrel gusto, visionary zeal, volcanic randiness and spooky-eyed instability. It’s a big, bold, breath-taking performance, the sort of thing you’d think Newman would be happy to talk about.
But, then again, it’s a performance we very nearly didn’t get a chance to appreciate. Writer-director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham) had to actively pursue Newman for Blaze, carefully wooing him for the project, then re-convincing the star all over again after Newman accepted the role, changed his mind, and almost walked away from the film.
”I figured I couldn’t do it,” Newman says. ”It was a big stretch. I didn’t know to what extent audiences would accept me in the part. I still don’t know whether they’re going to accept me in this role.
”So there was some waffling on my part about playing him . . . I don’t think things scare you. I just think that you take a long, cool look at something when you say, ‘Well, what am I going to bring to this? And what will I take away from it?”’
Newman had enjoyed Bull Durham, so he was eager to work with Ron Shelton. And he was thoroughly intrigued by A.J. Liebling’s book, The Earl of Louisiana, which vividly described a politician so flamboyantly cocksure, so unshakably proud of his own achievements, that he would boast: ”The three best friends the poor people have ever had are Jesus Christ, Sears & Roebuck and Earl K. Long.”
”But then I looked at some old films of him,” says Newman, recalling his first glimpse at the real, resolutely unglamorous Earl K. Long, a pugnacious scrapper who didn’t look anything like a Hollywood movie star. ”And that’s when I turned the part down again.”
What finally won him over, Newman says, was the multilayered complexity of the real-life character. Long was very much a populist ”years ahead of his time.” Just as important, from an actor’s point of view, Long was ”unhinged, which is kind of fun to play,” Newman says.
In the film, loosely based on Blaze Starr’s 1974 autobiography, Long brazenly frolics with Blaze (played by newcomer Lolita Davidovich), a woman nearly 40 years his junior, while campaigning for re-election. He thinks nothing of possible political fallout, figuring voters love him too much to care about his extracurricular activities.
Even when he’s committed to a mental hospital, he manages to spring himself by firing the state medical officials who put him there. (This inspires a new campaign slogan: ”I Ain’t Crazy! Vote for Uncle Earl!”) But when Long pushes for a voting rights bill to help blacks and poor whites, he gives his opponents some very potent ammunition.
”And I think his bouts of mental illness, and his very erratic public behavior in the legislature, was the thing that tripped off the pursuit (of his private life) by the press,” Newman says.
Long is enraged, claiming reporters ”got no right sticking cameras up people’s pants.” By that time, though, the damage has been done.
Newman, of course, has had more than his own share of clashes with overzealous journalists while struggling to keep his private life private. Did that make it easier for him to identify with Earl K. Long?
”Well,” Newman says with a smile, considering the question as he looks around the table. ”What can I say, guys? I don’t know that it was one of the reasons why I chose to play the part. But it’s certainly one of the more enjoyable aspects of his character — he did take off on (the press).”
Newman sees the 1959-60 press coverage of Earl K. Long as a turning point in public scrutiny of public figures.
”I think the human animal is a constantly escalating beast,” Newman says. ”They’re curious about information of all kinds. And once they run out of boundaries, they create new boundaries for themselves. And it seems quite natural for them to go from the political table to the politician’s bed. Which is unfortunate, beyond belief. And it does all of us a great discredit.”
Newman finds stories about the sex lives of the elected to be in exceptionally poor taste. Don’t talk to him about John F. Kennedy’s alleged infidelities while President: ”That does not in any way affect the ability of anybody to govern, as far as I know.”
Does this mean Newman thinks, say, Gary Hart got a raw deal? ”Yes, he got a raw deal. I don’t care how much he taunted the press. It’s none of their goddamn business.”
For once, Newman sounds interested, even passionate. He rouses himself only once more, near the end of his stint at the table, just before he gets up and leaves, when someone asks about his efforts to do a persuasive death scene in Blaze.
”I died for four days,” Newman says, ”and I’ll tell you, it’s no fun. But the worst thing is to crawl into your own coffin, and to realize that the bastards who build those things don’t give a goddamn for comfort at all. There was a steel rib running right down, horizontally, that thing, right underneath your shoulder blades. And there was no way a corpse could get comfortable in that thing. And I think that’s absolutely sickening. If they had to sell those things to live clients, they wouldn’t sell one of them. People would go out in a plain pine box.”
The reporters laugh, and so does Newman. But the smile fades from his face as he adds: ”The funny thing is, I really am outraged by that. That there is so little concern about detail.”
Well, I ask, since we already have Newman’s Own popcorn, and Newman’s Own salad dressing — maybe we should have a special line of Newman’s Own caskets?
”Hey, listen,” he responds with a twinkle in his blue eyes, ”that may work, you know?”
