Playboy Interview: Paul Newman

There are only a handful of them in the world: men whose expression of intent can bank-roll an entire film production; actors who routinely become multimillionaires every lime they take part in a movie; stars whose presence can cause crowds to gather and strong women to babble. The fact that Paul Newman, at 58, is all of the above--and still manages to squeeze in careers as a race-car driver, as a political activist and now, only half jokingly, as a salad-dressing mogul--seems to be more good fortune than one person should be allowed.

Yet despite the respect of his peers and the public, through a film career that lias spanned 29 years and 48 movies, Newman has never won an Oscar. He has been nominated five times (for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "The Hustler," "Hud," "Cool Hand Luke" and "Absence of Malice"), but the statuette has eluded him. This year, with the release of "The Verdict," in which he plays an ambulance-chasing attorney, Newman may finally receive from the Oscar jury its own favorable verdict--but not without competition from such actors as Dustin Hoffman, in "Tootsie," and Ben Kingsley, in "Gandhi"; nor without a massive publicity campaign mounted by Newman and his publicity people.

Whatever the outcome of the Oscar stakes, he is one of those stars destined to endure in the public's affection--since, as he put it to Playboy, he is blessed with "Newman's luck" and can't seem to shake it. He was born in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on January 26, 1925, the second son of a sporting-goods-store owner. He went to Ohio University briefly but left early to serve three years in the Navy during World War Two. When he returned, this time to Kenyon College, he joined the student dramatic society--but only after being kicked off the football team.

After graduation in 1949, Newman moved north to do summer stock in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. The next year, he moved again, to a theater group in Illinois, where he met--and married--actress Jacqueline Witte. His father's death forced Newman back home to manage the family business. A year and a half later, the business was liquidated and Newman, at the age of 26, entered the Yale University School of Drama.

Soon he was headed for New York, landed a job (at $150 a week) as Ralph Meeker's understudy in "Picnic" on Broadway and was accepted by Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. When Meeker went on vacation, Newman took his place. He was a hit--and never stopped being one.

Hollywood soon beckoned with a long-term $1000-a-week movie contract. His film debut was hardly earth-shattering: Newman played a Greek slave in "The Silver Chalice"--a film so wretched, in his judgment, that when it appeared on television many years later, he took out an ad in the Los Angeles Times apologizing to the viewers. ("That's the last time I'll ever do that," he now says, laughing. "The ad boosted the movie's ratings!")

Newman's first marriage produced three children: Susan, Stephanie and Scott, his only son, who died in 1978, at the age of 28, from an accidental drug-and-liquor overdose. After his divorce from Jacqueline, Newman married Joanne Woodward. They have three daughters: Elinor, Melissa and Clea.

Newman is a man of some complexity: He's a liberal who likes to race cars and drink beer; on the track, he's known simply as P. L. Newman. He may argue the point, but he obviously likes taking risks. In 1969, to prepare for a role in "Winning," a film about the Grand Prix circuit, he immersed himself in auto racing. When the film ended, he continued with the sport. Soon he had won all four of the Sports Car Club of America races, in which he competed with the Datsun-factory team. At the tricky Walkins Glen course in Upstate New York, he set a track record. And in 1979, he took on one of racing's toughest challenges, the 24 Hours at Le Mans--an endurance test that has claimed more than 18 lives over the years. Of 55 starters, only 22 finished the event. Newman and his teammates, driving a red Porsche 935 Twin Turbo at speeds of up to 220 miles an hour, finished second.

Having added the roles of producer and director to his résumé, Newman will soon enter yet another fiercely competitive business with his Industrial-Strength Venetian Spaghetti Sauce--like the salad dressing, a hobby he has turned into an avocation for charity.

He's also an outspoken political activist. In the Sixties, he involved himself with civil rights, as well as with Eugene McCarthy's Presidential campaign. In 1972, he worked for George McGovern. In 1978, he was appointed a member of the U.S. delegation to the special United Nations disarmament session. In 1980, he worked for John Anderson. And in 1982--for a change--he campaigned for a winner, the nuclear-freeze initiative.

But Newman doesn't live a life filled with the material prerequisites so many lesser stars seem to feel are necessary for success in Hollywood. He spends most of his time in a converted 1736 farmhouse near Westport, Connecticut. The rest of his life is spent, frenetically, among an apartment in Manhattan, a small and modest home in the flats of Beverly Hills, his film-location work and, last but not least, hotels and motels around the country that he uses each year between April and October, during the racing season.

Playboy sent journalist and producer Peter S. Greenberg to sit down with Newman for the first in-depth talk with him since his last lengthy interview--in Playboy 14 years ago. Greenberg's report:

"He's taller and skinnier than I imagined, and his blue eyes are, well, bluer. He's also the best-looking 58-year-old I've ever met. Prior to our first meeting, I had been told that he had only limited time to give me, and then he'd be off to Florida for a much-needed private vacation with his wife. He wouldn't be able to be interviewed again for weeks.

"The first session was held at his midtown-Manhattan office overlooking Fifth Avenue. We were frequently interrupted by phone calls from lawyers and his wife and a visit from A. E. Hotchner, his boating partner (together they own a 'yacht'--a 17-fool Boston whaler called Caca de Toro) and his coconspirator in his salad-dressing venture.

"I was beginning to think that the interview was a bust, when Newman asked me whether or not I liked to fish. Three hours later, I was packing for Florida. The 'vacation' turned out to be at a Pompano Beach spa that Joanne wanted to attend. Newman was going along for the ride, but jazzercise was not part of his game plan; sport fishing was. He chartered a boat.

"Each morning at six, while Joanne went to class, we headed out for the Florida Keys. As the 57-foot custom sport fisher maneuvered its way around the meandering canals in back of Pompano Beach's most expensive homes, I counted three housewives, each standing, in a bathrobe, behind the sliding glass doors to her house, hoping to catch a glimpse of Newman. 'I couldn't help myself said Captain Bob Mendelsohn, smiling, as he pushed down gently on the throttles. 'I had to tell a few friends.' Newman never noticed.

"Thank God, his luck wasn't all-powerful: Instead of the big game fish he'd hoped for, we settled for a respectable catch of yellowtail and bonito. But our time at sea was well spent as he reflected on his career and pondered his future.

"A week later, we picked up the interview in Los Angeles. Then it was off to Las Vegas for the Caesars Palace Grand Prix. In a small shack shaking in the gusty, dusty wind atop the roof of the casino, Newman watched the race, his eyes glued to car number five, his hand virtually glued to a cold bottle of Budweiser, shouting friendly obscenities at the drivers from his perch.

" 'He's more relaxed than I've ever seen him,' his 29-year-old daughter Susan told me later at their home in California. 'He's become more open about things.' He had flown to Los Angeles to speak to a group of television superstars that had assembled at his house under the auspices of the Scott Newman Foundation.

"Later that night, when Susan spoke to the group and mentioned that the evening would have been Scott's 32nd birthday, Newman got up and moved to a remote seat near the pool. He sat there, with his head in his hands, until she finished speaking.

"Newman is not an openly emotional individual. He's not a handshaker or a back-patter or a hugger. He's not outwardly demonstrative toward either Joanne or his children. His personal politics are out in the open, but his personal emotions are reserved, it seems, for only himself. He is still very uncomfortable talking about Scott's death. Later, when I reminded him of his reaction to Susan's talk, his voice grew quiet, he took pauses between sentences and tears came to his eyes. It was his most emotional moment during all the time we spent together.

"He has, by normal standards, an unusual relationship with his wife. As far as I can tell, he and Joanne don't spend much time together, but the structure seems to hold. 'I've been married to Joanne for 24 years,' he told me one day. 'That should tell you something. We respect each other and we're not insecure about each other's interests.' He has taken to calling her Birdie lately. Why? 'I don't know,' he says, smiling fondly. 'I just like the way it sounds when I think about her.'

"Nothing was off the record during our interviews, but Newman did have one request.

'The one thing we really can't talk about this time is fucking,' he said early on. 'You see, in the first "Playboy Interview," we sat around and talked about the many versions of fucking. After I had gone through a few of them--things like sport fucking--I got to mercy fucking, which I said was reserved for librarians. After the interview ran, I got hundreds of letters from librarians, with their pictures, inscribed "Try me!" '

"He remains a movie superstar still uncomfortable about his natural assets. If he's obsessed by anything, he told me, it's the main character in 'Tonio Kröger,' a short story by Thomas Mann. 'He separated people into two groups,' Newman says, 'the bohemians and the bourgeoisie. Well,' he sighed, 'I think I'm larger than life to the women of the bourgeoisie who think they're interested in me; but the bohemian women don't even care.' Still, most Americans--women and men--probably think of him as he was once described by longtime friend and director John Huston: 'Newman,' he wrote in his autobiography, 'will always be the Golden Lad.' "

[Q] Playboy: It's been a while since we've heard so much respectful talk about a Paul Newman movie--meaning, of course, your recent film The Verdict.

[A] Newman: Yeah, I was very happy with The Verdict, because for the first time in a long time, I wasn't Paul Newman playing Paul Newman. I'm not usually happy with my work.

[Q] Playboy: Did you consider the role a risk?

[A] Newman: If you played the character as it was written, there was no way to protect yourself as an actor. You had to do it warts and all: vulnerable, unattractive, drunk, fierce, frightened--all those things. He certainly is no strong, virile antihero, like so many of my other roles. Here's a guy who finds himself face down in a urinal and has to do something about it.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't there at least one other movie in which you didn't play a very attractive character? We're thinking of Slap Shot, in which you played a hockey player almost over the hill.

[A] Newman: I loved that movie. It rates very high as something in which I took great personal satisfaction. It may be about the only one I rate that high. It was deeply original, and while we were shooting it, it got to the point on the ice where you couldn't tell the skaters from the actors.

[Q] Playboy: Yet Slap Shot received a lot of criticism as a highly violent movie.

[A] Newman: It was cartoon violence.

[Q] Playboy: Even though people got the hell beaten out of them in fairly bloody ways?

[A] Newman: I never saw it as a violent film. I don't even know that you ever saw anybody get hit. Well, yes, you did see it a couple of times.

[Q] Playboy: It was your favorite, but the movie didn't do so well.

[A] Newman: Well, in the motion-picture industry today, what does it mean to do well? It really has no meaning. This is the worst year for actors and technicians in the history of motion pictures. There are only a few films being shot in Hollywood; there's a 60 percent unemployment rate among the technicians, and that's with television. Yet the box office has never been more successful. So what does it all mean? The old-time studio producers might not have been literary giants, but at least they weren't computer-management analysts. Today, it's all demographics. The invention and the fun have been taken out of it.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever felt that you had control of one of your movies all the way from script through distribution through release?

[A] Newman:Rachel, Rachel is the only one I can remember. I really hung on to that.

[Q] Playboy: You took on two challenges in that movie. One was the directing itself; the second was directing your wife, Joanne Woodward. Why did you want to direct?

[A] Newman: Why not? You have to understand that I have that kind of personality. I just say, why not? Why not get into salad dressing? Why not race? Directing allowed me to be in control of the entire canvas, rather than just one small part. Also, I was curious to find out if I could direct.

[Q] Playboy: Your wife said you were the best director she ever worked with.

[A] Newman: Well, what's she gonna say? But [smiles] she's right. She did make it easy for me, though.

[Q] Playboy:Rachel didn't do very well at the box office.

[A] Newman: Yeah, I guess I had a vision that other people didn't share. It was turned down by every major studio and every major independent producer in the state of California.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get it made?

[A] Newman: By promising to do two films for Warner Bros. at half my salary; Joanne promised them one.

[Q] Playboy: Such is the basis of creativity.

[A] Newman: Such is the payment, or the penalty. Well, what the hell. I tried to talk Redford out of directing his movie.

[Q] Playboy:Ordinary People?

[A] Newman: Yep. I thought the first part of the script was a disaster. But he had a vision of it that I didn't share. And I thought that what Redford finally accomplished, structurally and dramatically, was a triumph. But I don't know what contributions he made to the actors; that's always hard to tell.

[Q] Playboy: What about your directorial contributions to Rachel?

[A] Newman: Well, it was pretty hard to win the New York Film Critics' Circle Award as best director for that film and then not even get nominated for the Oscar. But I'm not gonna whine about it.

[Q] Playboy: Going back to that extraordinary statement you made about feeling that Slap Shot was perhaps the most satisfying of all your movies--were you really serious?

[A] Newman: Yeah.

[Q] Playboy: Compared with your classics, Hud and The Hustler?

[A] Newman: When I look at those films today, I realize how hard I was working.

[Q] Playboy: How about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke and The Sting?

[A] Newman: Those films were there when I got them.

[Q] Playboy: Meaning that you walked through them?

[A] Newman: No, just that a movie like Butch Cassidy would have worked no matter how many mistakes we made. But with Slap Shot or The Verdict, I don't think you could have made any mistakes and had it work. Look, satisfaction is hard to define. It's what you start with and what you finish with. And the pride you take in that role, as well as audience response.

[Q] Playboy: Still, it will be a disappointment to the people who identify you with your role in The Hustler to know how little you think of your performance.

[A] Newman: That reminds me of something that happened one evening some years ago when I was playing pool at a local pub. I had played five or six racks and was over by the bar, talking to some people. So this young kid, about 19 and half-bagged, came over and said, "Mr. Newman, I want you to know I saw The Hustler four or five times. Great picture! I also want you to know I watched you play pool tonight. It's been one of the greatest disappointments in my life!"

[Q] Playboy: Since you've admitted it yourself, you won't mind being reminded that in his Playboy Interview, George C. Scott said he wasn't impressed with your acting in The Hustler.

[A] Newman: I don't think I'd have been very impressed, either. I was just working too hard, showing too much.

[Q] Playboy: But you are impressed by his work, aren't you?

[A] Newman: Scott? He's electric. Unpredictable, with a marvelous sense of threat and danger, which was so great for his part in The Hustler. He was on Broadway recently, playing a light Noel Coward role, and it just split my skull, because he was so fucking outrageous and delicious. He was the wrong man in the wrong part doing it absolutely right.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any other actor whose work you admire?

[A] Newman: Well, I've been envious of a number of actors. But if I envy anything, it's more the way a person lives than the way he performs.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Newman: Olivier.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Newman: Because he always seemed to be able to balance his existence between stage and screen; because there seemed to be in him enough facets--either of his own personality or of his fantasy life--to be able to draw from. He didn't exhaust those facets. He didn't repeat himself. He dared more. Whereas I ... I seem to have run out of my own skin fairly early....

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Newman: I seem to have exhausted my ability to create something new after a rather short duration as a performer.

[Q] Playboy: Do you really think that about yourself?

[A] Newman: Yeah. I catch myself in movies doing mannerisms that once were successful. If you find that you're just falling back on successful kinds of responses, then it's unsatisfying. Unconsciously, you feel an attitude of dismissal or boredom that encroaches on your own approach. Come to think of it, I can't think of anybody who would be more bored than an actor who did nothing but interviews and did them constantly--to sit down and repeat your response to autograph seekers, critics, newspapers. The only alternative is to lie, to invent a whole new set of circumstances, a whole new set of beliefs, a whole new set of aspirations. That could be fun, because then you would no longer be functioning as a person, you'd simply be functioning as a writer.

[Q] Playboy: Since you're in a mood to be honest about your work, what else has dissatisfied you?

[A] Newman: I exclude The Silver Chalice, which was terrible, but I simply had no experience. I also exclude some scripts I had to do under contract.

[Q] Playboy: Was The Silver Chalice that bad?

[A] Newman: Yes, it was that bad. It's extraordinary that I survived the movie. I'm convinced I didn't know very much about acting at all until a half-dozen years ago. In the final analysis, I'm a very, very slow study. I was a terrible actor when I went to New York. I was scared. I would overprepare, sometimes overthink a role.

[Q] Playboy: What about some of those movies around the middle of your career, such as Torn Curtain, with Alfred Hitchcock?

[A] Newman: I think Hitchcock chose his actors very carefully, regardless of his legendary feeling that he didn't respect them very much and felt that they were just puppets. The camera shots were predetermined and you simply got up there and did your best. The problem I had with Torn Curtain was that I never felt comfortable with the script.

[Q] Playboy: Then why did you do it?

[A] Newman: Well, Hitchcock is the reason. The man was a legend. He called me up and said, "Are you interested?" And I said, "Oh, gosh, send me a script right away." And he said, "We don't have a script." Warning bells went off. So I spoke to Hitchcock and we agreed that the idea could work if it were well executed. After all, any bad idea can work terrifically if it's well executed.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Newman:The Towering Inferno. The relationships didn't have what I would call thick, universal and penetrating appeal.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you did that movie right after you did The Sting. You couldn't find two more different movies if you tried. That is what we're driving at--the contrast between your best work and your schlock.

[A] Newman: You're not gonna get a sensible answer from a fella who put a 351-cubicinch Ford engine in a Volkswagen. I can't answer that. I did know that something as serious as Rachel had a chance on the open market because it dealt with a universal fear. And, in a way, I felt that Towering Inferno might be more than just a disaster movie. It dealt with two very real fears of people living anywhere near high-rise buildings: height and fire. I thought it might peripherally have some effect on the fire laws. I think for a while it did.

But as to how I chose my roles, good or bad, it was clear to me at the beginning that there were only certain kinds of roles in which people were prepared to accept me. Strong, virile, antihero roles. Luke, the hustler, Hud. But you know what? Hud backfired.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Newman: Well, we thought the last thing people would do was accept Hud as a heroic character. After all, Hud is amoral, greedy, self-centered, selfish, in it for what he can get at the expense of the community. We thought we could give him the external graces: a hot-shot with the women, a good drinker, brave in his profession, a good barroom brawler. But morally, he's an empty suit. We thought that the audience would be unnerved by that and might be taught by that. But kids thought he was terrific! His amorality just went right over their heads; all they saw was this Western, heroic individual.

The audience is always looking for a definable image. The clown, the girl next door, the sultry seductress, the patrician, the tough kid from the streets, the country-club kid, the momma figure, the poppa figure--all of those are definable characters. And it's easy for each to telegraph a certain kind of radiance to the people in the audience so they don't get bewildered.

[Q] Playboy: In which category do you put yourself?

[A] Newman: Oh ... Yale Law School.

[Q] Playboy: Really? Rather than as that sexy guy whom women go crazy over?

[A] Newman: It's funny about that, because when I was in college, I just didn't seem to have any gift for women. As a matter of fact, later, when I understudied Ralph Meeker in Picnic, I still seemed to have some problem with the ladies. Ralph is a big, beefy, muscular, sexual, physical kind of a guy. When he left to go on vacation, I played his part for a week, I think. And afterward, I asked Josh Logan, the director, "Could I please play his part on the road?" And Josh said, "Well, it was a very interesting performance, but you don't carry any sexual threat at all." So I worried that bone around for a long time. In fact, I transferred to Kenyon College from Ohio University because I finally wanted to get out of a coed school. I had become much more interested in the ladies than I was in my studies. I really wanted to get a degree. At Ohio, in those days, the sexual revolution hadn't really gotten started. There was much less opportunity to get into trouble. A date back then was sitting around with a bunch of students, drinking beer or going to a film or a hayride, or singing songs by the river.

[Q] Playboy: It was all that innocent?

[A] Newman: I don't know that it was so innocent. I mean, everybody was thinking about it; it's just that there were more restraints. I'm not so certain that those were not, in fact, better, more mysterious days. It was like having maybe three desserts a year and relishing them because you simply didn't get them 365 days a year, sometimes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Nice girls didn't fool around, and nice guys didn't try to fool around with nice girls. Them was the bylaws.

[Q] Playboy: When did you break away from them?

[A] Newman: I don't know that I ever did.

[Q] Playboy: Even today?

[A] Newman: Even if I did, the extent to which I did or didn't is not for public consumption.

[Q] Playboy: In any case, it's certainly a contrast with your admitted image--the strong, virile antihero.

[A] Newman: Yeah, but not the animal. Not the true grizzly. I never projected that. I think that as actors, Marlon Brando and Tony Quinn came across that way. It's a tough image to sustain--that you're an animal who has the ability to park in front of a whorehouse without ever getting a parking ticket.

[Q] Playboy: That's a nice way of phrasing it.

[A] Newman: Well, we try to be as delicate as we can in print. But Marlon also dared as an actor. It wasn't just image. And his rebellion came out of a true eccentricity, I think, and not as a rebellion for the sake of rebellion nor for the sake of image. I am sorry that he wasn't as disciplined as he was eccentric in his personal life.

[Q] Playboy: At one point, there were a lot6 of comparisons made of you and Brando.

[A] Newman: There's a funny story: When I did Somebody Up There Likes Me, I practically lived with Rocky Graziano in New York for two weeks to prepare. Later, the comments and reviews were that I was imitating Marlon. Many years later, I saw Rocky again. He told me, in the way only he could, "I was sparrin' around, really workin' hard, and there was this funny, strange kid standin' here. He'd sit dere and watch, you know? Finally, I sez, 'What are you doin' here, kid?' He sez, 'Well, I'd like you to come and see a show of mine.' I sez, 'What, you mean a stage show? I don't wanna see no fuckin' stage show! Why'd I wanna see a fuckin' stage show for?' " This is Rocky talking, you know; I think that's where my terrible vocabulary came from. So Rocky said, " 'Well, kid, do you sing or sumpin'?' He sez, 'No.' I figured the kid was a spear carrier or sumpin'. Anyway, the kid gives me two tickets, and when I tell my wife, she sez, 'Oh, that's a pretty good play.' So we go and see the play, and it's a thing about a streetcar, written by this famous author, what ever it was. And I see this kid onstage. So I sez, 'That kid is playin' me!' "

Well, so much for the Brando comparison. Turns out, we both had the same model. Marlon did his earlier for A Streetcar Named Desire, which had already been on the screen by the time I played Rocky. But I didn't know that Brando was playing Rocky. So, in a way, the reviews were accurate.

[Q] Playboy: Then what about the Yale Law School image?

[A] Newman: Well, I would still have trouble playing a duplicitous character. I don't think audiences would accept me as that.

[Q] Playboy: So aside from the few unsympathetic roles you've taken--such as the latest one, in The Verdict--how brave have you been about choosing roles that break your good-guy mold?

[A] Newman: I don't know. To some extent, you're restricted by what is submitted to you. And if people don't see you as a grizzly type, you're not likely to get grizzly parts.

[Q] Playboy: Meaning that your good looks get you certain kinds of roles. Which opens up a wonderful opportunity to dispose of some rumors about your appearance. OK, straight out: Have you had any plastic surgery?

[A] Newman: No plastic surgery.

[Q] Playboy: No special injections of blue dye in the eyes?

[A] Newman: No. And I'm also taller than most people think.

[Q] Playboy: How about the story that you have special eyedrops flown in from Sweden to make your eyes bluer?

[A] Newman: Come on. Visine? Murine?

[Q] Playboy:Have you had your eyes done?

[A] Newman: Done? With these bags, are you kidding?

[Q] Playboy: But there are stories about your dousing yourself in ice water every day.

[A] Newman: If I've had a bad night's sleep, I take a couple of trays of ice cubes, stick them in the washbasin, turn on the water, get the water freezing cold and stick my head in there. Yeah, it's true.

[Q] Playboy: What other idiosyncrasies?

[A] Newman: Well, no one can understand why I take little magnets with me when I travel.

[Q] Playboy: OK, why?

[A] Newman: To keep the shower curtain closed. Yes, you take these magnets and simply attach them to the bathtub at intervals and it keeps the shower curtain from blowing around.

[Q] Playboy: Scratch another promising rumor. So: We've mentioned the eyedrops from Sweden; they're out. We've mentioned plastic surgery; that's out. What else have we eliminated?

[A] Newman: I think we've probably eliminated my career. Wait a minute! We've missed something here.

[Q] Playboy: We have?

[A] Newman: We didn't discuss sodomy or massage parlors. If I talked about that, I could run for public office.

[Q] Playboy: Why haven't you ever run for public office?

[A] Newman: Well, I've been approached. But I won't run. Because I can barely, barely, just barely handle the aspects of my life that are public right now, and I don't think I could handle the dinners, the banquets, the campaigning, the public kind of campaigning.

[Q] Playboy: There's also the argument that, as an actor, you should stick to acting and forget politics.

[A] Newman: Well, I'll be damned if I'll give up my citizenship because I'm an actor. I think it's interesting that Jerry Falwell, representing the Moral Majority, is actively opposing the bilateral freeze. Now, there are a lot of liberals out there upholding separation of church and state, saying that he should shut up. But they wouldn't have said the same about Martin Luther King, Jr., who derived considerable strength and financing from his church. That's OK. But Falwell isn't allowed the same luxury.

[Q] Playboy: Do you support Falwell?

[A] Newman: I support his citizenship. And I don't think you can deprive him of his citizenship because he's involved with a church. I think he's making a tragic mistake, but I will certainly support his right to make that tragic mistake. That's what's known as having your cake and eating it, too. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: Before we get heavily into politics, we've just remembered one more rumor that doesn't fit the image--that you've been through some sessions of est, the self-help program.

[A] Newman: Joanne did it. I didn't.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Newman: The one time I was set up to do it, I got the flu, I think. It works on alternate mornings.

[Q] Playboy: What, est?

[A] Newman: No, the concept of est. Some mornings, I wake up and I'm very pleased with myself. On those mornings, I could do Molière or Aristophanes. Another morning, I wake up and I'm not very pleased with myself. I feel as if I couldn't do Molière or Arthur Miller or even Walt Disney. On those down occasions, I think I would be a candidate for est. I think the only thing that you learn from est, really, is that you are responsible for what you do. I've already accepted that responsibility.

[Q] Playboy: When did you accept it?

[A] Newman: Oh, about five minutes ago. Actually, I've always accepted it. If I've had problems, I've never unloaded on my parents or outside circumstances or genetics or anything. I just say, simply, I'm responsible for what I do. I'm also responsible, unfortunately, for a lot of people.

[Q] Playboy: Such as whom?

[A] Newman: I think at one time I had 36 people I was basically carrying: secretaries, relatives and children, wives--not wives, well, ex-wife. And, by virtue of that, whoever happened to be in the family.

[Q] Playboy: That's a lot of baggage.

[A] Newman: But it hasn't been difficult for me, because I've been able to financially afford it. If it suddenly became a terrible burden, I don't know how I'd treat it. But that seems to have been a pattern in my life. I've never cared about money, so I don't seem to have had any problems making it.

[Q] Playboy: Is it as simple as that?

[A] Newman: Yeah, if you don't worry about it.

[Q] Playboy: It hasn't corrupted you?

[A] Newman: I'm not saying that it hasn't corrupted me. I'm just saying that at Yale, I ran out of money and had a wife and a child. So that Christmas, I went out and in ten days sold $1200 worth of Encyclopaedia Britannica. And at that time, in 1951, that was a lot of money for a school kid. As a kid, I sold Fuller brushes and had a newspaper run.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been broke--other than that one time?

[A] Newman: I've been very close. When I opened on Broadway, I had about $250 in the bank, with a pregnant wife and a child.

[Q] Playboy: How did you make ends meet?

[A] Newman: Well, the play was a big hit. It ran about 14 months. If it had been a flop, I'm not sure that you'd be seeing this particular face on the [mockingly] silver screen. I don't know what would have happened. For one thing, I think you have to make up your mind very early whether or not you want to create an empire. I'm not very eager to do that. All I want to do is make sure that if I live to be 72 or 76, I won't suddenly be working in a drugstore to support myself.

[Q] Playboy: Apparently not, with your kind of luck.

[A] Newman: I've always been lucky; incredibly lucky. The old "Newman luck." Somehow, it's allowed me to get close to a lot of edges without falling off. I think I survived World War Two because of Newman's luck. It's an extraordinary phenomenon. During the war, I was a back-seat man on a Navy torpedo plane. The pilot I flew with had an ear problem one day and we were grounded. The rest of our squad transferred to an aircraft carrier. They were 75 miles off the coast of Japan that day when the ship took a direct kamikaze hit and they all died.

[Q] Playboy: What are some other examples of Newman's luck?

[A] Newman: When I was at Kenyon College, to make extra money, I ran a student laundry. In order to attract business, I'd buy a keg of beer every Saturday morning. Guys from school would bring in their laundry and then sit around all day drinking beer. It was a great idea, and I was taking in $200 or $300 worth of laundry. Then, when I graduated, I sold it to a friend of mine--and that's when the authorities decided to finally shut it down. That's Newman's luck.

[Q] Playboy: Just a second. It may not be earth-shaking news, but why did the authorities close down Newman's laundry?

[A] Newman: It may not be publishable.

[Q] Playboy: Try us.

[A] Newman: No, I can't handle it.

[Q] Playboy: If we did our research correctly, it had something to do with a horse.

[A] Newman: Oh, God, yes.

[Q] Playboy: Well?

[A] Newman: Well, I had sold the laundry. Now, this was the kind of town where horses still trotted down the main street. One day, a stallion had the misfortune of standing in front of the laundry. It wasn't long after the Saturday beer had been delivered; one of the college customers had put on a pair of boxing gloves and was seen performing an unnatural act on the stallion.

[Q] Playboy: Jerking it off, in other words?

[A] Newman: Suffice it to say they shut the laundry down the next day.

[There's a break in the interview, and it resumes with Newman behind the wheel of a rented Camaro in Florida, taking his daughter to the Fort Lauderdale airport.]

[A] Newman: You figured we'd get around to talking about racing, about driving, right? You know, most American cars can't corner for shit. [Takes a turn] Hey, this one's not too bad. I'm surprised. But, you know, with driving, as with a lot of other stuff in my life, I was a very, very slow learner. I don't make any claims that I could have been a great professional driver. But I'm a pretty confident amateur.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get started?

[A] Newman: I was preparing for Winning, a race-car movie. I spent some time with Bob Bondurant in L.A., and he started me off in an 1100-c.c. Datsun sedan, driving around pylons in the parking lot.

[Q] Playboy: How did you do?

[A] Newman: Oh, I suppose I was all right at that. The last day, he put me in a Formula B that was kind of out of the box. I think the sway bars were kinked. I think it had massive toe-in and I couldn't point the car. I thought, My God, if this is a race car and I go from this to a Can-Am car, I'm really in trouble, because I was missing apexes by three feet. I drove very cautiously during the picture, because the cars were way over my head.

[Q] Playboy: How fast did you go?

[A] Newman: It was nothing to drive 180 miles an hour down the straightaway. That's nothing. It really wasn't until the mid-Seventies--1975 or 1976--that I really began to catch on to what it was all about. And even now, I'm a competent amateur driver. In the professional world--let's say, Can-Am racing or the Champ Car racing or the big stockers--I just don't think I could go that fast. Maybe I could go reasonably fast if I had enough time on the tracks with the equipment. Don't misunderstand. I'm not lacerating myself by saying that I'm a slow starter. In fact, I may even be faintly complimenting myself by saying that whatever I lack in natural ability, I make up for.

[Q] Playboy: How did Joanne take to racing?

[A] Newman: She has just been the best of all things through all of this. But she's never put any kind of pressure on me to do anything other than what I'm doing. Well, I don't know if that's an accurate statement; yes, she does make requests. Now, I enjoy all aspects of the theater, though after I'd seen Giselle for the 19th time, I became resistant. But Joanne and I have a reciprocal-trade agreement. And there are some things that I won't actually go to by myself, but I will with her.

[Q] Playboy: What things?

[A] Newman: The 46th running of Giselle.

[Q] Playboy: What is it about racing--about getting behind the wheel and driving the car--that attracts you?

[A] Newman: I don't know that I've really ever answered that question. It's just something that I really wanted to do and I did it. It's like salad dressing. I just decided one day, Why not do it? And it's marvelous to say, "I want to do it because I think it's going to be fun." Then you surprise yourself when you do it, because it is fun. It's just fun; that's all. I can't be competitive about acting, because there's no way you can compete as an actor. What are you competing against? In auto racing, either you win or you lose. You go across the finish line and come in first or second or ninth--or not at all.

[Q] Playboy: Has it helped you as an actor?

[A] Newman: Joanne says it has. Her theory is that I was getting bored as an actor, maybe because I couldn't get out of my own skin any longer. And that I was starting to duplicate myself. She says that she thinks that part of my passion for racing has now bled back into my acting. I don't know. It's as valid a theory as any other I've heard.

[Q] Playboy: But what is it that excites you? Is it the speed, the power? Is it the technology? Is it being able to take a turn?

[A] Newman: I suppose that's the final kick--to run a race or run one lap of a race and feel good about what you're able to do with that machinery. Somewhere along the line, I like to think that I went as fast as the car could go, that I went around there at the limit of my own adhesion. That gives me the same good feeling about myself that I have when I figure that I've licked a scene. It's like a gardener who looks at a bed of flowers and knows it's the best.

[Q] Playboy: But there's certainly an element of physical danger with racing that doesn't exist with gardening.

[A] Newman: I think the element of risk is in degrees, depending on what kind of car you drive. Guys who drive the formula cars, open-wheel cars, are almost literally in front of the front wheels. They stand a much better chance of getting hurt than I do. The car I drive is pretty well protected.

[Q] Playboy: What do you say to people who claim you have a death wish?

[A] Newman: Horseshit. I don't think that's part of it at all. I think the way it is with racers is that somewhere along the line, they like the idea of cars and they start with gocarts. They go from gocarts, when they're old enough to go, into Formula Vees and Formula Fords or Formula Super Vees. And after a while, maybe they feel they can control something that's a little tougher, a little harder, a little faster. And the next thing you know, they're going from Formula Vee to Can-Am cars. I don't think it has anything to do with a death wish. The kid who gets into a gocart when he's 12 certainly has no death wish. And that same kid at the age of 28, when he gets into a Formula I car, has simply graduated and gone on in his profession to what is considered to be the toughest and the best.

[Q] Playboy: What about the actor who gets into one of those cars not at 28 but at 58?

[A] Newman: People seem to think for some reason that my personality is embedded in concrete. It isn't. I'm a very whimsical person. So you can't get a straight answer from a whimsical person about a whimsical thing that he does at the age of 58.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you run into some resistance from the pros when you started it--that you were a dilettante, an actor playing at racing?

[A] Newman: No, they just thought I was slow. And I was. Again, I was also lucky.

[Q] Playboy: Let's take up Newman's luck again as it affected you professionally. When did it start?

[A] Newman: It's interesting; if you talk with people I worked with in school, they will say I had a great deal of promise. Two years of drama and undergraduate school, a year at Yale for my master's, two years of summer stock and a year of winter stock--but I really didn't know anything! I got into the Actors Studio by a fluke; during my audition, they mistook terror--which is what I felt--for performed emotion. Later on, after I'd gotten my feet wet understudying in the Broadway production of Picnic, I was up for a live-television role. James Dean and I were supposed to do a TV show called The Battler, with Jimmy playing the lead and me in a supporting role. Then he was killed. They asked me to play his part. I said, "I can't do that, emotionally." But I did it--the next day on television, live. Soon after that, I was offered the role of Rocky Graziano. I'm still convinced that if Jimmy had done The Battler, he'd have gotten the role in Somebody Up There Likes Me.

Thinking back to that, and to all of my experience since, I suppose I'm just surprised that I'm alive. I'm not a religious person; you can't say God is looking after you because He took Jimmy Dean. You can't say God is looking after you because He gave your pilot an earache but put the 15 other guys in coffins.

[Q] Playboy: What can you say?

[A] Newman: Well, I guess I just.... Listen: There was some kind of study done a few years ago--I don't know if it's valid--that measured the many reasons that people ended up in a particular high-income group. It turned out that being in the right place at the right time was the most significant factor. Knowing the right person was the second most important thing. Skills came in third. [At that moment, Newman puts the car through a turn very quickly]

[Q] Playboy: And knowing when to put on the brakes?

[A] Newman: And knowing when to put on the brakes. Well, if you had braked slowly and neatly on that turn, you would have missed the light. This way, you slow down very quickly and get down to turning speed and get through the turn. Even in racing, I've just been very lucky--very lucky. If the throttle sticks in a 900-horsepower car, you're OK--except if you're in Lime Rock, Connecticut. And that's where I was once. There are six turns in Lime Rock. It's a very tight track--ups and downs. If the throttle had stuck in any other turn except the one in which it stuck, I would have been in deep, deep ... bouillabaisse!. Heavy bouillabaisse. [Laughs] That's just one of the instances. I (continued on page 158)Paul Newman(continued from page 76) simply seem to be able to slip close to the edge of things.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't there also a time when you were racing that a car fell onto the roof of your car?

[A] Newman: That's a highly exaggerated story. A car fell onto the hood of my car. There are two Newman's laws, you know. The first one is, "It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down." The second one is, "Just when things look darkest, they go black."

[Q] Playboy: Judging from that, you've rolled a vehicle or two.

[A] Newman: [Smiles] Yeah, I rolled a '73 Porsche once in Louisiana. A few years earlier, I had a motorcycle accident and lost a 650 Bonneville Triumph. I sold all my cycles the next day. I wasn't wearing a helmet that day--and that was also Newman's luck.

[The locale shifts from Fort Lauderdale to Newman's home in Beverly Hills.]

[Q] Playboy: Define Newman's luck, once and for all, as it has affected your looks, your career, your personal life.

[A] Newman: It starts with the luck of genetics. In the business I'm in, I seem to have the right physical appearance. It's not just a question of attractiveness or unattractiveness. It means I have a metabolism that keeps me thin. I'm also shy, and shyness is strictly a genetic trait. Now, how people deal with shyness is something else. Will it make you try harder the next year? With me it was ... well, if I were a dog, I would be a terrier. I always see them as dogs that are trying to handle bones that are much too big for them, trying to dig up bones under fences when the fences are too deeply embedded. I am lucky to a fault, but I am also very determined. I will somehow get that bone. I will get someone who weighs 300 pounds to stomp on the bone! I'll get a Mercedes-Benz to drive over the bone! Anyway, if I ever write an autobiography, it will be called The Way It Looks from Up Here in the Plum Tree. [Smiles]

[Q] Playboy: Why a plum tree?

[A] Newman: I don't know. I guess a plum tree has always been where kings and queens sit.

[Q] Playboy: Why haven't you written it?

[A] Newman: I suppose if I really wrote an autobiography, I would have to get into who did what to whom, when I did what and how, and I don't think that's anybody's business. This is the great age of candor, the age of the New York Post and The National Enquirer, but my theme for the Eighties is "Fuck candor." It even inspired me to write a poem--just one. I call it The Age of Candor. Want to see it? [He goes into another room and returns quickly, putting on a pair of reading glasses] Allow me to read it to you:

"Is mystery there?

Penthouse--

Hustler--

Spread--

Wide.

World Wide

Viva, Screw!

Do these invest a head

with magic speculation?

Well ....

I talk more to lust

with veils and shadows

In darkness

layers peeled

Each tactile step

Read not in kilowatts

The intimation of ...

suggests

my private wonder."

[Q] Playboy: That's appropriate, because we were going to dip into your unwritten autobiography and ask you about some of the episodes in your life you've never talked about. Such as the period in 1953 when you were already married, with three children, and you met Joanne.

[A] Newman: Yeah, and that's why I say fuck candor. It's simply nobody's business. What happened to us during that period is not gonna help anybody live a happy life--it's not going to help people's marriages, it's not going to destroy their marriages--and it's simply nobody's business.

[Q] Playboy: Although since that time, you have certainly set a showbiz record for endurance in happiness and marriage.

[A] Newman: And that also is nobody's business. You know, there are a lot of things in our business that seem to have become hard-and-fast rules. One of them is that no matter what you're doing--if you're having a romantic dinner with your wife, if you're shooting the bull with the kids, if you're discussing a script with a friend, if you're just walking happily down Fifth Avenue, no matter what you're doing--you must, if somebody asks you, stop and put your name on a piece of paper. Now, that may not be in the area of invasion of privacy, but it is in the area of violation of human rights. There is a human right that you should be allowed to speak with your wife without interruption if you care to; I care to. I care to walk down Fifth Avenue without--sometimes on request and sometimes on command--putting my name on a piece of paper or standing for a photograph with someone's favorite dog or family baby. When people say, "Smile," or "Take off your dark glasses," I immediately think of a drill instructor ordering me around. So when a media person says, "Tell me about your difficult year of 1953," I say, "Why? On whose recognizance?" I believe I can say that with the full support of most of the human-rights organizations around the planet.

[Q] Playboy: All right. But your complaint about autograph signing is a common one among celebrities. Why did you feel you could stop?

[A] Newman: I can tell you when I stopped. I was standing at a urinal at Sardi's in New York and a guy came through the door with a piece of paper and a pen in his hand. Since that moment, I've thought about the foolishness of it and the indecency of it and realized there was no situation that could not be violated. Thinking back on that moment, I wonder, What do I do with my hands? Do I wash them first and then shake hands? Or do I shake hands and then wash up?

[Q] Playboy: Still, don't you feel you owe something to those who pay five bucks to see one of your movies and support your stardom?

[A] Newman: Sure, I owe them a lot. I owe them the best performance I can give; I owe them an appearance on my set exactly on time: I owe them trying to work for the best I can, not just for money. But if somebody says that what I owe him is to stand up against a wall and take off my dark glasses so he can take a picture of my baby blues, then I say, "No, I don't owe you that." I try not to be hurtful. I say something like, "If I take off my glasses, my pants will fall down." Or, if they're insistent, I say, "Sure, I'll take off my dark glasses if you'll let me look at your gums." Fair's fair.

[Q] Playboy: So the blue eyes still are a concern to you. The old joke about your greatest terror being a tombstone with the Words Here but for his Blue Eyes....

[A] Newman: The blue-eyes stuff is offensive because of the implication that you'd be a failure if you didn't have them: "That's how you made it, so take off your glasses so we can see your famous baby blues." It's like with Bo Derek, you know: "Take off your brassiere so we can check your boobs." It has exactly the same connotation; there's something of a put-down to it.

[Q] Playboy: Essentially, what you're saying is that after all these years, you're still pretty embarrassed by your celebrity.

[A] Newman: Suspicious is a better word. It just comes from knowing that it all has to do with my appearance on the screen, which has nothing to do with me. So I am suspicious. I suppose that's why most of my friends are people I've known for 20 or 25 years.

[Q] Playboy: Does that suspicion ever veer into paranoia?

[A] Newman: Well, John Foreman, the producer, once gave a description of me that I love and cherish. He said, "Paul Newman gets up every morning, walks to the window (continued on page 202)Paul Newman(continued from page 158) and scans the horizon for enemies."

[Q] Playboy: True?

[A] Newman: Well, there are people--and things--to scan the horizon for. The real question for me is, Who's worthy of being an enemy?

[Q] Playboy: We're waiting.

[A] Newman: The perpetrators of Vietnam, of course. People trying to sustain the arms race. But, you know, if you were really serious about who was out to get you, you'd have to spend so much time working at not getting screwed at all, it would hardly seem worth the effort. So I figure I'm likely to get screwed a little bit--and that way, I don't waste a lot of time. There are too many other things I enjoy doing. It's like getting on the best-dressed list: It would take so much time and effort, I just don't have the patience to be well dressed.

[Q] Playboy: Where else do you think you've been screwed?

[A] Newman: Oh, there are a lot of things, but they're not important enough to get vindictive about.

[Q] Playboy: We're talking about being reflective, not vindictive. For instance, how are things between you and the IRS?

[A] Newman: They've audited me every year since the late Sixties.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Newman: All I know is that my timing has always been good. Here's a true story: Early in my career, I was in my business manager's office, which, at the time, was in New York. I was going to be audited. The guy from the IRS was in the next office with my manager's assistant, and my manager said, "Paul, it would really help if you would go in and butter him up." And I said, "I couldn't do that." And I refused. But, sure enough, I walked out of the office a few minutes later and there came the taxman out of the assistant's office. He walked up to me and said, "You don't keep very good records." I said, "On what?" He said, "On your entertainment, your taxis, everything." I said, "Well, here's how it goes. In order to be an actor, you really have to be a child. And, if that theory is correct, then it follows that the more childish you are, the better actor you are. If I'm really a good actor and I make a tremendous amount of money--from which I have to pay the Federal Government--then what you want me to be is an accountant. And if I'm an accountant, I'm a responsible human being. I'm mature. If I'm mature, I can't be a very good actor. Which means I can't make any money!" Now, if you were a guy from the IRS, what would you say to that? It was so eccentric. Funny thing: Three days later, my manager called me up and said, "I don't know what you did to that guy, but all the stuff that they're disputing--$30,000 worth of expenses--they've forgotten it."

[Q] Playboy: And you lived happily ever after.

[A] Newman: Yes. But I still get audited every year!

[Q] Playboy: Where would the press rank on your enemies list? You've been bitter on a couple of occasions in the past.

[A] Newman: Well, you've got The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which try to be responsible newspapers. But it's just tragic that a newspaper like the New York Post, with its heritage--pedigree is a better word--should have to fall into the hands of people who have a sleazy editorial philosophy. They've really savaged me pretty good with phony captions under pictures, turbulence where there was no turbulence, turmoil where no turmoil existed.

[Q] Playboy: About what?

[A] Newman: Once, the Post printed something like, "Newman has finally succumbed to doing Japanese commercials for Datsun in the United States." I have done some commercials in Japan, which they pointed out.

[Q] Playboy: What was so bad about that?

[A] Newman: The only thing I've done in the U.S. is a public-service thing about safety belts. That's what I did, for which I got nothing. The difference is that it's my perception that to be asked to do a commercial in Japan is considered a great honor, especially if you're a foreigner. To be asked to do a commercial in this country is a sign that you're on the take or on the skids. That's my perception.

[Q] Playboy: You mean you've never been tempted to do a U.S. commercial?

[A] Newman: The closest I ever came to doing one was for Polaroid. We were in negotiations, and then the lawyer from Polaroid pissed me off.

[Q] Playboy: What happened?

[A] Newman: He started telling people that they were paying me too much--that they had given away the store to get me. And that got back to me. I got mad. I said I didn't want to work for people who thought they were getting screwed. So I backed out. I understand the Polaroid attorney got fired about 12 hours later.

Anyway, while I'm wound up about the press, there was also People magazine. When it came out, I was told it was going to be a very respectable, responsible magazine. I did one of its early cover stories. Subsequently, I felt it was sort of becoming a gossip rag. I was asked to do a new story. I refused. So they put me on the cover anyway, without an interview. They even raised the issue price. Then, when I was campaigning for Ramsey Clark for the Senate in 1976, the campaign manager said that a People reporter wanted to go along on the airplane. I agreed but thought it was really gonna be a bad mistake. When the article finally came out, sure enough, the headline was: "Ramsey Clark finds a Gimmick in Paul Newman." Now, I had campaigned for him several times before that, and it was just untrue on the face of it! So I've never been interested in doing anything with People since.

Then there was Time magazine---

[Q] Playboy: For which you've done a recent cover story.

[A] Newman: Yeah, well, my dance card's been full. Anyway, for a long while--and because of Time--I wouldn't drink Coors beer. That was really a strange situation: Back in the mid-Seventies, Coors was trying to dispel a rumor that it had unfair hiring procedures. The fact that Joe and Bill Coors were considered very conservative politically is irrelevant. That's what a democracy is supposed to be about. The liberals won't tell you that; the liberals want only one party--theirs. But my firm feeling is that you've got to have two parties and one of'em's gonna be conservative; that's the name of the game. I certainly wouldn't have had any ill feelings because the executive of a beer company was of a very conservative political cloth.

Well, around that time, somebody from Time was doing an article about Coors, talked to me, and I pointed out that Coors was environmentally more progressive than almost any other brewer. I didn't know about unfair hiring practices. But then the guy from Time said he had seen a $50,000 check to Anita Bryant, written by Joe Coors. Now, that wasn't political; it was antigay, meaning anti-human rights. So I said I did feel injured by that. That information found its way into Time, which said I had therefore switched from Coors to Budweiser.

In fact, at that time, I was starting to go into racing other than my own cars and we were looking for sponsors. Several of them were beer sponsors. Budweiser, Michelob and Coors seemed good to me. None had forced fermentation or forced carbonation and I liked the beer. I went with Budweiser and I've stayed with them happily.

But, anyway, the guy from Time said he had seen the check to Bryant, right? About two years later, Peter Coors came by. He was a gentleman I really liked. And we were at MGM and chatted for a couple of hours. He handed me a newspaper article in which a gay minister in San Francisco admitted starting the rumor that Joe Coors had written a check for $50,000 to Bryant. There had been no check to her. I'm still looking for that guy from Time.

[Q] Playboy: For all your principled stands on commerciality, how do you feel you've been treated with regard to this new salad dressing you're marketing?

[A] Newman: First, the press has taken it too seriously. A reporter for The New York Times asked about it and I told her I did it because I wanted to build a power base. I think she believed me! I have a marginal-to-somewhat-vulgar sense of humor, on the theory that if something is truly funny, it's never vulgar. Actually, let's just say that in my later years, I have determined that you can be a responsible citizen and at the same time have a lot of fun. Now, there's not a very logical argument that can be made for getting involved with salad dressing. But one thing is for sure: Reagan's salad days are over. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: But why oil and vinegar after all these years?

[A] Newman: And herbs--don't forget herbs. Actually, the kids really enjoyed it. I used to have to make up huge batches for them when I went on location. Then I started bottling it. I have always been of a rather whimsical nature. I don't know whether it's whimsical or irresponsible. It's one or the other. The salad dressing is part of a plot, actually.

[Q] Playboy: Will you reveal it?

[A] Newman: Oh, yes. I want to capture and control the global supermarket! Seriously, I always try to almost violate the character once during a filming of a picture, so that the audience never gets complacent, sits back and says, "Well, I know what that guy's gonna do." That's why I did salad dressing. Besides, I've designed it so any profits from the dressing go directly to charity. People should know that.

[Q] Playboy: OK. You pride yourself on your sense of humor and on being unpredictable. What else?

[A] Newman: I pride myself on being on time. In almost four years of theater, I missed only one performance, and that was because I had a 24-hour case of the flu. And in 30 years, I have missed five days of shooting--all at once, because I had the flu. I think in 25 or 30 years, I've been late maybe five times. In fact, I had a needlepoint made and framed for Redford that Said, Punctuality is the Courtesy of Kings.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you have it made?

[A] Newman: Because he needs it.

[Q] Playboy: You and Redford have been playing practical jokes on each other for quite a while.

[A] Newman: It's more than that. They're out-and-out hustles. Now, the secret of any hustle is that you have to have information that the other guy doesn't have. Redford is a very good athlete. I wish I could get him into the racing business. He indicated on the set during Butch Cassidy that he had been a rather good fencer in high school. And he'd say he was good enough to whip anybody in a radius of ten miles. Our director, George Roy Hill, heard that, and the information that he had was that his assistant, Bobby Crawford, had almost gone to the Olympics out of Yale as a fencer. Hill came to me and said, "I don't quite know how to get the hustle moving, but it will go in the following direction: I will challenge Redford to a fencing match and bet him $50 that I can whip him. He will know that there's no way I can whip him and will agree to the match. Around Friday, I'll start to complain about back problems, and Saturday, the day of the match, I'll say that I'm not able to compete. And Redford, being an honorable man, will give me back my $50. I will then suggest an alternative: my second. Redford, being a confident man, will accept the second. My second will then whip his brain." So I said, "Well, we've got one tragic flaw in that, George. He'll smell it and won't accept the second. I'll bet you two dollars he won't." So I see the opportunity for a double reverse hustle. I can go to Crawford and suggest the following scenario: that he win the first four touches and then let Redford take the next five, just to make it obvious that the thing had been thrown. And at the end of the match, Crawford and I would be seen exchanging a lot of money. So that would mean Hill was hustled, betrayed by his own kind, while Redford was hustled by Hill--and I would have outhustled both of them!

[Q] Playboy: What happened?

[A] Newman: Well, there are always imponderables to the hustling business. Crawford giggled and laughed and thought it was terrific. So everything was set. On Thursday, Hill went up to Redford and said, "My back is bothering me." On Friday, he said, "My back is bothering me a lot." On Saturday, an hour before the match, he said, "I forfeit." And Redford immediately walked over to George and asked for his money. And Hill said, "Do you mean to tell me that you're going to take that $50 from a cripple?" Redford said, "You're goddamn right I am." So much for charity. Hill said, "What about accepting a substitute?" Redford said, "Of course I'll accept a substitute." So at that point, Hill was out $50 and I was out two dollars, right? Well, at least we had Crawford to count on. The match started on the steps of our hotel in Mexico. Redford is left-handed, and they were using foils. He fenced absolutely defensively and would hardly move. Crawford got the first touch. Redford got the second. Crawford got the third. They got even at four-four. I didn't know what was going on. Finally, with a big lunge, Crawford got the winning touch. Redford gave Hill back his $50. So Hill and Redford were even. I was the only one who was out--two dollars! I couldn't believe it had backfired. So I went over to Crawford and said, "What happened?" And he said, "Well, I thought it was a terrific plan until I went upstairs and told my wife. She said, 'Bobby, if you throw the match, I'm going back to Los Angeles and I don't think I'll ever speak to you again.' " So that was the one imponderable that I hadn't figured on: His wife wouldn't let him throw the match.

[Q] Playboy: Is there ever any malice behind these hustles?

[A] Newman: I'd say that beneath all hustles there's some malice. And you don't always deal with the potential repercussions, either. Once, I was shooting The Mackintosh Man with director John Huston. The setup for the shot was that I was 70 or 80 feet in the air, on a little porch with a railing around it, and I was supposed to signal to somebody out on a ship. I had at the time a wardrobe guy who was known to have a fierce temper. So I saw the beginning of something working for me there: a little porch and a big guy with a terrible temper. So we decided what we were going to do: A couple of times, making sure everybody below was watching, I was gonna yell at him and shove him, as if I were treating him like dirt, and he was gonna visibly restrain himself, just barely keep it in. Well, they finally yelled, "Action!" and I pretended I had really lost it with him and ducked back inside the house from the porch to get at him. Suddenly, out I flew from the window, past the porch, arms and legs flying, down to the ground beyond a fence to where nobody could see. There was this "Aaaahhhh!!!!" from the set. It was a dummy the guy and I had fixed up, of course. I waited about 15 seconds and then waved down at everybody gaily. Well, it had never occurred to me that someone--including, perhaps, Huston--might have had a heart attack. So I've slowed down on my hustles somewhat.

[Q] Playboy: You disappoint us. Surely, one of your hustles worked to your satisfaction.

[A] Newman: Well, there was the Great Newman-Redford Porsche Hustle. No, wait. He won that one.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about it anyway.

[A] Newman: Redford was driving along a road and saw this Porsche that had hit a tree at about 130 miles an hour. It had been cannibalized. He had the thing picked up and delivered to me as a present. Well, I turned around and had the thing compacted. I found a lady who knew about Redford's burglar alarm at home, and she helped us bypass it. We left the compacted Porsche inside his vestibule with a note: Although he appreciates it, Mr Newman is returning this gift to you very simply because he cannot get the motherfucker started.

[Q] Playboy: Then why do you say that Redford won that hustle?

[A] Newman: He never admitted that it was returned! He also trained his wife and his kids not to say a word about it. The car never arrived at his house, according to him.

[Q] Playboy: But you know that it did.

[A] Newman:I put it there!

[Q] Playboy: Hustles notwithstanding, were you happy with The Mackintosh Man?

[A] Newman: No, it just didn't come together. I felt the story would have been good and I wanted to play an Australian. Huston turned it down when I first submitted it to him. Then he reconsidered and thought maybe he could strengthen it.

[Q] Playboy: One critic wrote that when you were good, you were very, very good. And when you were bad, you were miscast.

[A] Newman: What a sweet, sweet thing to say. What a very nice thing to say. You know, I suspect I could be even more miscast in the future than I have been in the past. Because I think I'm going to stop worrying about being a movie star and start being an actor again. I'll hang out there a little bit. Aspire to a little more risk-taking.

[Q] Playboy: Then why didn't you take the lead in All That Jazz a few years ago--a very risky role?

[A] Newman: That was bad; it was dumb of me. I was just so stupid, I didn't take into consideration what the contribution of the director was going to be. That was a terrible oversight.

[Q] Playboy: More recently, you were offered the lead in Missing, the film Jack Lemmon ultimately did. Why did you turn it down?

[A] Newman: I really wanted to work with Costa-Gavras and I'm not above doing something that is critical of our American society, politically, socially or morally. But if it is going to be critical, I want it to be my criticism and not somebody else's. There are a lot of areas that I would love to get into--oil companies, insurance companies, the military-industrial complex--but I simply did not want to be the mouthpiece for somebody else's criticism.

[Q] Playboy: At one point, weren't you going to do a movie in which you played a homosexual?

[A] Newman: Yes. It was called The Front Runner, about a track coach and one of his runners. We could never get the script right, though we must have rewritten it five times.

[Q] Playboy: If you had gotten the script together, it would have marked quite a departure for you, wouldn't it?

[A] Newman: As an actor, yes. But not in terms of philosophy. I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter, either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being--things that I really admire.

[Q] Playboy: For instance?

[A] Newman: People who really care about other people. People with humor. People with talent. People who are capable of giving and are not simply takers. People who recognize their own foibles. People who really actively aspire to something. People who actively want to produce something for society. People who appreciate, who laugh. People who strive to understand, to make themselves decent and ethical, moral human beings. So that by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it's irrelevant. If you go with the reverse of all this, you can have someone who kicks the bejesus out of his wife, who is a scum bag in the business world, who's not particularly respected, who's not capable of sharing, who's got no sense of humor about himself, who doesn't really aspire to anything except being a whore and making a couple of bucks--but because he uses his privates with someone of the opposite sex, then he's a "man" and that somehow makes him all right.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about your upbringing, how you formed your values.

[A] Newman: All right, but I warn you, I'm not in the business of pointing fingers. There are a lot of people who say, "I'm the way I am because Mommy thrashed me or Daddy never kissed me or hugged me." A lot of that is just the excuse business.

[Q] Playboy: Without pointing a finger, were you very close to your dad?

[A] Newman: [Long pause] Probably not. But I suspect that that was a lot more my fault than his. I didn't have any idea of what being close to an older person was until much later in life. I left home when I was 17 and I really didn't go back. I graduated from high school when I was 17, went straight into Ohio University. Then I was called up by the Navy on the sixth of June 1943. I was in the Navy on the seventh.

[Q] Playboy: But what about before you graduated from high school? Did you spend any time with your dad?

[A] Newman: Not really. He worked six days a week in those days. And I didn't know what was going on, either with myself or with the outside world. I don't think he had the patience to deal with things in a superfluous way--which, again, is not a criticism of him. It's really a criticism of myself. I was a late bloomer.

[Q] Playboy: What about your mother?

[A] Newman: She was raised in a very poor family and had a sense of values that we pooh-pooh right now--you know, materialistic things, trying to get two cars in the garage. But I'm reticent about getting into family history.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Newman: It's not that it doesn't deserve some kind of examination, but I am very, very leery of young people's spouting off about the inadequacies of their parents, especially because they do so through the lens of an adolescent with growing problems. Those people who write books about their famous parents--I have a difficult time with it. All they're doing is trading on their parents' notoriety.

[Q] Playboy: Can you characterize your relationship with your brother?

[A] Newman: Belligerent, I think, is a good word.

[Q] Playboy: Brotherly competition?

[A] Newman: Belligerent is still a good word.... I just wonder more about this business of good parent, bad parent. Does it matter as much as the shrinks contend? Less? More? What makes some kid claw his way out of the ghetto? Is it all environment? One or two children can come from loving, understanding, supportive families and turn into absolute rotters. I've seen too many people, and I'm not talking about myself--or maybe I am, I don't know--much more affected by their peers than by their parents. Hell, I know I was. The friends I had in college and I got into all kinds of scrapes, brawls. Even got arrested three times for minor stuff.

[Q] Playboy: So your slate has been tarnished with three arrests.

[A] Newman: Plus the horse incident at the laundry. I wasn't even there, but you know how those things go. Still, I don't make a claim to Christlike behavior.

[Q] Playboy: Want to confess?

[A] Newman: Well, if anything, I guess I'm bourgeois. Sure, I've smoked grass, but I've never done anything else. I'm a square.

[Q] Playboy: How square is that?

[A] Newman: I'll show you how naïve I am. At one time, I saw these silver razor-blade necklaces and thought, How marvelous. You wear your razor blade, and if things get really tough, you go [mimics slitting his throat]. I thought that was so funny. So I bought one and I thought nothing about it. Somebody took a couple of photographs of me somewhere and they were all in dope-oriented magazines. That's just how naïve I was. I mean, I didn't know from [makes a snorting noise].

[Q] Playboy: But you did know from booze.

[A] Newman: Sure. I drank whiskey a lot. For a while, it really screwed me up. There are periods of my life in which I don't take any particular pride, but I don't know why those times should be for public consumption. But the people who continue to do these things to excess, well, I think the core of all those people is that they really don't like themselves very much. The ones who can't control it have got to be in such a state when self-indulgence turns to self-destruction.

[Q] Playboy: How do you help them?

[A] Newman: You simply do it by loving them and supporting them, believing in them. Obviously, the greatest secret is not to start; then you don't have to worry about having a problem. And the young people now--people who enjoy the position of persuasion--they simply persuade other people to do what they do in order to have some followers. They can't say they're the outsiders screwing up. They simply persuade others to screw up with them. Those young Machiavellian kinds of people. They're young and dumb. It applies to sex as well--the kids who aren't really interested in getting sexually involved with someone. Then someone says, "Ah, come on, get it over with." Why? What's the purpose? Some Machiavellian sense that someone has some control over another person's life. "Ah, boy, did I get her laid." There're a lot of girls who say that to their girlfriends.

[Q] Playboy: How do you know that?

[A] Newman: Because my daughters have told me about it. All of them.

[Q] Playboy: You were talking about those razor-blade necklaces---

[A] Newman: Ah, yes, there's the glorification of cocaine. You think about someone like John Belushi. He died as a direct result of that. I suppose there was some kind of sardonic machismo in that. All the jokes about something that he knew was killing him. And he must have had a glimmer of that, that he was certainly on the short side of the edge of where he was going. There are other things that can be glorified that I think are just as interesting. The receptacle that we are living inside of for a long time. I'm not saying that I did that all my life, but I'm beginning to realize there's a bonus. There's a tremendous bonus to being on the outside looking in. Watching what all the crowd is doing. And while they're doing it, I'm gonna be the observer. I remember one case where a celebrity was doing a film about drug abuse. The fact is, if there ever was a day he should have been straight, it was the day we shot the film. But he was all bent out of shape.

[Q] Playboy: Your own life was touched by a drug tragedy--the death of your son, Scott. A few days ago, when we were talking at your house and your daughter Susan was talking about Scott, I noticed that you put your head in your hands.

[A] Newman: I don't know how I'm ever going to respond to that at any given moment. Sometimes it's OK and sometimes it's not.

[Q] Playboy: Where were you when you heard the news?

[A] Newman: I was at Kenyon College, directing a student play, when I got the call.

[Q] Playboy: It must have been a horrible moment.

[A] Newman: [Tenses up] I don't know. In a way, I had been waiting for that call for ten years. Somehow, my body mechanism built me an anesthetic for when it really happened. I was ... a lot of things when I got that call. I was probably more pissed off than anything.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean you had waited for that call for ten years?

[A] Newman: I think the difficulties start when both people start working. And then I think, probably, at some point, both people give up. And that can be ten years down the pipe. Scott and I had simply lost the ability to help each other. I had lost the ability to help him, and he had lost the ability to help himself.

[Q] Playboy: That must be a terrible feeling. As a parent, you never really want to give up or at least stop trying.

[A] Newman: I had simply lost my ability to make a difference. Any kind of difference.

[Q] Playboy: When you got the news that Scott had died, you kept going, didn't you? You stayed and directed the play.

[A] Newman: There was nothing else I could do. I guess it's funny now; I hardly know a family that isn't touched by it. I'm really more surprised that it simply seems to be getting worse. It doesn't make any difference whether it's LSD or angel dust or cocaine or booze. People are just looking around for a sledge hammer somewhere along the line. I gave up hard liquor because I simply couldn't handle it. That was my sledge hammer. We were finishing shooting Sometimes a Great Notion. I don't know if it was the pressure of the picture, but I really was out of line. I've always been fascinated with why one embraces the sledge hammer. This is not just for John Doe, it's probably applicable to myself, but they say you can take the kid out of Shaker Heights, but you can't take Shaker Heights out of the kid. Well, oh, yes, you can! You can do that very simply with a fifth of good Scotch. Because then you can never tell what the kid's likely to do.

[Q] Playboy: When you took Shaker Heights out of the kid before 1971, what were you likely to do?

[A] Newman: Oh, hanging him from chandeliers was not beyond the realm of possibilities. A lot of bad stuff with cars. Generally boorish behavior.

[Q] Playboy: What finally got you to stop?

[A] Newman: Like everybody else, a person who has an addictive personality just finds that moment when he simply doesn't want to do it anymore if he's lucky. It happens with people who are overweight, with people who smoke too much--whatever it is that they wish they could stop doing. There comes a moment when they simply stop doing it. It does not come because other people cuff them heavily about the head and shoulders. I just decided to stop.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been able to figure out why Scott didn't?

[A] Newman: I think he'd be the only one who could answer the question. Somehow, personalities grow together. The personality of a human being finally comes together. It may come together satisfactorily and that person can be productive and feel OK. Some people don't seem to be able to get the personality into the kind of shape that survives. There are a lot of survivors around who survive by doing the wrong things. By doing the things that I don't particularly respect. People who survive by becoming whores. It covers not just prostitutes but a huge spectrum of whoredom.

[Q] Playboy: Give us your idea of a whore.

[A] Newman: I can think of a lot of them. A young kid who creates his freedom from parental supervision by selling dope in the city to other kids. A young girl who accomplishes the same by allowing her body to pay for housing, nourishment, transportation, entertainment with a bunch of the locals. Guys in the business who make their living from exploitation in films, probably sexual or violence exploitation. Yes men and entourage guys.

[Q] Playboy: At what point in your relationship with Scott did you realize that you had lost it?

[A] Newman: I don't know that there was any given instance. I just realized that whatever I was doing in trying to be helpful was not being helpful at all. In fact, it could have been harmful.

[Q] Playboy: So you backed away?

[A] Newman: Well, we both backed away.

[Q] Playboy: In the Fifties, when your first marriage was breaking up, you saw a psychiatrist. Did it help?

[A] Newman: Yes, it helped me in some ways to have a more realistic appraisal of myself, to get in touch with my emotions. Some of it was effective and some of it was helpful. A lot of it was irrelevant.

[Q] Playboy: Did you know the difference then?

[A] Newman: Yeah, but I still learned a great deal about myself. I realized that I was a late bloomer. That I seemed old enough to take some aspects of this thing that people call stardom not too seriously. I seemed to have a built-in mechanism that worked. It was in other areas--self-evaluation and so forth--that I was still really an adolescent. I suppose that's true of a lot of people if they're very together in some areas and fall apart in others.

[Q] Playboy: How did the psychiatrist help you evaluate yourself?

[A] Newman: Well, he taught me to like myself better, which I don't. He taught me to recognize the level of my achievements, which I don't. He taught me not to "should" myself, which I still do.

[Q] Playboy: You're telling us that the operation was a success but the patient died.

[A] Newman: Very close. I always wonder about those people who claim to have it all together. Quietly, the lid of their head finally separates between their ears. I think they will sooner or later understand the extent of genetic influence instead of environmental influence. It's like a lot of things. The more you come to know about things, the less you really understand what you know. And the more you seem to find a psychological argument that holds water, the more you can find another face in the mirror that says exactly the opposite and is just as penetrating and viable.

[Q] Playboy: To what extent did your drinking and boorish behavior have an influence on your children?

[A] Newman: It's really very hard to tell. Very, very hard to tell. And, by the same token, if the parent is, in fact, the role model and, for instance, takes a great pride in being punctual, does that mean the child is going to be punctual? If the only music he ever hears with his parent is Bach or Beethoven or Mozart, does that guarantee that he will listen to only that music? It seems to me that peer pressure is much more influential in terms of what children actually do. The only thing that the parent might do is to give the kid such a sense of himself that he can afford in his own head to be independent. But that doesn't seem to happen much.

[Q] Playboy: Your daughter once said that she didn't think you were in touch with reality sometimes. With the real world.

[A] Newman: I think there's a big element of truth in that. But I think I'm really suspicious of young people who write about their parents. As I said, they are writing through whatever lens they happened to be looking through at the time of the experience.

[Q] Playboy: It's the second time you've mentioned it. Are we correct in guessing that you were not happy when Susan participated in a book about children of celebrities?

[A] Newman: There's nothing the matter with anybody's doing interviews. I'm only saying that if it is to go down in a time capsule, then I think the target ought to be allowed a day in court, too. I'm thinking specifically of the difficult time that Henry Fonda had, during which he behaved like an absolute gentleman. Fonda was a beautiful, gifted, ethical, moral man of film and theater. That's enough. And decent, decent. That's not necessarily a very flattering word, but I guess it is in conjunction with the other ones. And his greatest show of decency was when his kids were attacking him and he didn't shoot back, though I suspect that he had a tremendous amount of ammunition.

[Q] Playboy: What was going on?

[A] Newman: That's not for me to say. But I think Henry could have lobbed just as many grenades toward the nursery as the nursery was lobbing at him, but he didn't.

[Q] Playboy: And what about your nursery?

[A] Newman: I think the generation that I came from accepted a lot of myths. That the real struggle was to get the second car in the garage. That was the determining factor in worth. Self-esteem. In a certain sense, you strove for that almost unconsciously. Along with that was two and a half children. That was simply something that was to be done. If you had been told somewhere along the line, and listened, that you really had to have a philosophy about motherhood, fatherhood, what those responsibilities were--instead of simply conceiving children--I'm not so sure that Joanne and I had that philosophy. Some say you really have to have a mother and a father in order to be a mother or a father. I didn't know what I was doing when I started to be an actor or a race-car driver or a salad magnate. And I didn't even understand anything about fatherhood.

[Q] Playboy: Has there come a point at which you thought you knew what it was all about?

[A] Newman: I don't know. I've really been receptive to being a parent, somewhere in influencing the way the kids felt about themselves.... But I don't even know where I'm going with that. Somehow it has to do with being there in the early times, before peer pressure took hold. Do you read me? If you read anything that makes any sense, the second I say it, there's a contradiction that pops up in my mind. [Tenses up again] One day I wake up and I think I'm terrific, and the next day I wake up and I think it's all junk.

[Q] Playboy: It's excruciating for you to talk about this, isn't it?

[A] Newman: Yeah, because I'm really not in the pain business--either absorbing it for myself or inflicting it on other people. I read about these people every day who are blowing their mouths off about associates, neighbors, children and friends. I've never felt any need to do that. Even though politics is another matter, I admit.

[Q] Playboy: You've always considered yourself politically active, haven't you?

[A] Newman: Yes, even though I've been deceived.

[Q] Playboy: You're talking about supporting Lyndon Johnson?

[A] Newman: Yes, in 1964. I went to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. I campaigned for Johnson because he said he would reduce troop strength in Vietnam. He said he would de-escalate. He said he would get us out. Goldwater said he wanted a build-up. Johnson won the election and did the opposite. I had been severely had, especially when the Pentagon papers later came out. The decision to escalate had actually been made before the convention!

[Q] Playboy: Were you really surprised?

[A] Newman: Well, if you go back and look over the projections of the bomber gap, the missile gap or whatever, what do you find? That whenever there's a new weapons system around the corner, it is necessary to create a climate of terror. And if you can create a good enough climate, then you get the funds from Congress, you get all the weapons systems you want. And [Secretary of Defense Caspar] Weinberger is the most dangerous. If one person goes into a job saying, "I'm going to do a certain thing," and does a complete 180-degree turn, you can say either that he's flexible or that he's pliable. Well, I think he was pliable. So instead of being Cap the Knife to cut waste out of the Pentagon, he became Cap the Rubber Stamp. From McNamara on, the Secretary of Defense has always functioned as a devil's advocate. At least McNamara had the good manners to ask some serious questions. But Weinberger is just a wimp with a rubber stamp. And I suppose if all of those missiles represent penis envy, those guys really.... No, it's adoration, I think. Yes, I like that. That has a good ring to it--phallus adoration.

[Q] Playboy: Anything else you like about Reagan's outlook?

[A] Newman: Yeah. "You gotta get tough with the Russians." Go ahead, guys, get tough. But then the specifics are left up to people who recognize only hardware. The interesting thing is that they're not asking the right questions. There are a lot of answers; but those answers are to the wrong questions. Nobody's asking the right questions.

[Q] Playboy: What are the right questions?

[A] Newman: In a world in which there are 50,000 nuclear warheads--I call them the great relaxers in the sky--do you increase your own national security by decreasing the national-security opponents? In conventional terms, of course, that concept would work. In nuclear terms, it doesn't work at all. But nobody's asking the questions: How much is enough? Will the concept of civilian defense work? I think it's ludicrous. Civil defense is dependent upon the cooperation of your enemies. Can you believe the Government actually thinks it will be possible to evacuate cities in a nuclear war? It would take about a week to do it. Don't you think the Soviets will notice? And if they do, do they launch on warning? I can just hear it. "Guys, give us a week so our civilian-defense thing will work." Well, you can't move 100,000,000 people. It's absurd. It seems to me that if this is going to function as participatory democracy, then people have to be preoccupied with knowledge and turn it into something that entitles them to the freedoms they have. That subject is not difficult. I mean, any kid who's been through the sixth grade, if he were given the opportunity to study both sides, could come up with an acceptable conclusion. It's not difficult. I am not a particularly smart guy. I am not technologically oriented.

[Q] Playboy: But you can sure make things look dark.

[A] Newman: You mustn't forget Newman's second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.

[Q] Playboy: And where are we now on the brightness scale?

[A] Newman: Sorry, I can't think of a darker time in recent history. I am disturbed about, what I don't know, but I am much more disturbed about what they don't know.

[Q] Playboy: What don't they know?

[A] Newman: Survivability of command control; electromagnetic pulse; the idea that you can have a surgically limited exchange, assess the damage and then decide whether you're going to do something else; that you can fight a limited nuclear war in Europe. But nobody is seriously talking about what happens when the number of warheads arrives at a point when the difference between being first and second is no longer meaningful. Do you increase or decrease national security? Or do you opt for a bilateral freeze? Otherwise, you run the risk of escalation to the point of triggering a massive exchange. In my way of thinking, there are no winners. Now, they say there are winners--but certainly not in our lifetime. Nations will be devastated. If the Pentagon has made a mistake, if we cannot fight a limited, surgical nuclear war, if they have made a mistake and there are no burn beds, no hospitals, no doctors, if they've made a mistake so that there is no communication, very little transportation, then we'll simply become a mandarin society with feudal overlords--one in Minneapolis, one in Tucson, one in Amarillo, one in New Orleans--with these little feudal societies fighting with one another, snapping at one another's heels because one has got better water than the others and one may have food supplies. If that happens to the United States and Russia and China, if Japan is crippled by massive injections of fallout, if there is less fallout in the Southern Hemisphere because the winds have a tendency not to cross the equator, will that make Brazil the superpower of the planet, or Argentina, or Australia? Will Guatemala be a stronger power than Great Britain? Now, maybe there are people around who know all those things, and maybe even the suggestion of something like that means that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I think the Government doesn't know about as much as I don't know and the stuff that it does know--such as the size of detonations and how many, or the diameter of a hole created by a 20-megaton bomb--may fit nicely into one of its many scenarios. But I don't think those scenarios involve people.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Newman: Look at everything else we do. We like to sacrifice people in America--25,000 a year to bars that serve alcohol; 50,000 to cars. But somewhere, there's a perverted philosophy that's prepared to accept one nuclear accident every ten years, with a loss of 500,000 people. And it's the same society that refuses to wear seat belts. It's an abhorrent society out there. They're fucking lemmings.

It's a new philosophy. We are the lemmings of the world; rejoice! A lot of it is the public's fault. Either they're too lazy to really find out what's going on or they forget. It's like a woman in childbirth. She forgets the pain of having a child. And when David Stockman goes up there and really blows the whistle loud and clear--"We're just throwing money at the military; we don't have any program; this is not supply-side economics; it's the old trickle down"--why don't they jump up and down and scream a lot? Then you get Weinberger on the boob tube. He's not talking about deterrence any longer. Those weapons that he's talking about--the MX and the Trident II and the Pershing II--those are not for the defense of the United States. Those are pre-emptive-strike weapons.

[Q] Playboy: OK, you're enlightened about this. But take the guy out there on the streets. He may be concerned about nuclear warheads, but his basic concerns are paying his MasterCard bill and getting home at night---

[A] Newman: Yeah, and knowing exactly where the Mets stand, doing all his homework on that, or whether or not Calgary is going to win the hockey cup. Or who's going to win the sixth race at Hialeah ... or getting laid. But this nuclear issue transcends all other issues! It transcends immigration, inflation, unemployment and getting laid--because if there's a miscalculation, all the other issues become irrelevant.

[Q] Playboy: But most people can't see beyond inflation and unemployment.

[A] Newman: We've lost sight of a lot of things in this country. What may be called the American trait of individuality and self-sufficiency has somehow--like the growth of the uncontrolled cancerous cell--been transformed into the individual's being unwilling and unable to make a short-term personal sacrifice for the long-term community good.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think anybody even knows what that is anymore?

[A] Newman: The long-term community good? No, I don't think big business does. I think that's what screwed up Detroit--the short-term, every-year profit. You know, the Japanese can look at something that's going to happen eight, nine, ten, 12 years in the future. Somebody in the Ford family said, "Minicars mean miniprofits." He ain't saying it now.

[Q] Playboy: Of course, you're one of the few people who drive a Datsun that gets only two miles per gallon.

[A] Newman: Actually, it gets about 1.8 miles. It's my contribution to big oil, one of my favorite subjects. Of course, it's hard to find out what sort of profit the oil companies really make, especially after the price rises of 1974. That's when I helped start the Energy Action Committee to try to provide information about the oil companies. If you want to get information about oil reserves, where do you go? You go to the oil companies. And they'll tell you whatever they want to tell you. You want to find out about defense information, you know, the only place you can go is to the Pentagon.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you feel at a great disadvantage?

[A] Newman: Absolutely. Look at what's happening with water quality. The Government will relax the Clean Water Act of 1972, so that instead of its being mandatory that they remove 85 percent of raw waste, it may be necessary to remove only 25 percent. And they justify that: "Some waters are better able to clean themselves than others." Look how long it took them to clean up Lake Erie. We're eating whitefish out of there now. We cleaned that fucker up! Well, you've got a tremendous flow of water through there. If it happened to Lake Superior, it would take 1000 years or 100 years. Think about it. They're just cleaning the Hudson up now. We had a chance to get some clean fish, but they're going to fuck it up. That's what's so depressing.

[Q] Playboy: Why don't you give up? You paint an overwhelmingly gloomy picture.

[A] Newman: Well, I suppose I'm a still-operational cynic. But I don't think you can stop scrapping just because it looks like you're fighting a losing battle. You've got to let them know you're still out there.

[Q] Playboy: At least Nixon knew you were out there. In 1973, when his enemies list was released, there was Paul Newman's name right at the top.

[A] Newman: Well, I could figure out that my name was up there for only one reason--because there were certainly a lot of bigger guns than myself. But one day, when I was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire, in 1968, I was met at the airport with a brand-new Jaguar. I said, "Boy, that's a nifty car. How come we got away from Rent-A-Wrecks?" And someone said, "Well, the Jaguar dealer is going to give it to us to use for three days up here." And then I found out, just as I was leaving, that the Jag dealer was covering his bets. Nixon was coming up for the next three days and he was going to get the Jaguar. So I put a little note on the dashboard and it said, dear Mr. Nixon: you should have no trouble driving this car at all, because it has a very tricky clutch. And that's the only reason I could figure that I was on the enemies list.

[Q] Playboy: The only reason?

[A] Newman: Well, I think that's the one that pushed him over.

[Q] Playboy: But that was one of the awards you gladly accepted.

[A] Newman: Oh, yes.

[Q] Playboy: If that isn't a transition back to awards and Oscar fever, nothing is. In your 29-year film career, you've been nominated for an Oscar five times--for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke and Absence of Malice. You've never won. By the time this interview is published, you may finally have your shot at it. How much would an Oscar mean to you?

[A] Newman: Theoretically, you'd like to say it doesn't mean anything. I mean, how can you compete with another actor? It's like trying to say that the Russians are superior to us in strategic nuclear weapons or that we are superior to them. You trade off accuracy for megaton. You trade off a character that is flamboyant and eye-catching and electric for a shy, retiring, low-key kind of role. Who is to say which performance is better? Who started out with what? Ultimately, I think there's a perverse kind of pleasure that I haven't won an Oscar. Actually, I'd like to win an award, I think in my 73rd year. Why? Just so I could get up there and say, "Well, it's taken a long time."

[Q] Playboy: How do you see yourself at 73? Or do you see yourself at 73?

[A] Newman: Well, every once in a while, when the world is looking particularly gloomy, I wish there were a halfway house where I could really go, have my friends around me, have one last bash and say, "I'll see ya."

[Q] Playboy: Seriously? End it yourself?

[A] Newman: Well, I'd like to have the courage to go some way like that, to hit a wall at terminal speed or something. And yet there are a lot of people I've known who've had that philosophy in their 40s but who hung on by their fingernails as they slipped off into the other world.

[Q] Playboy: And what will it be for you? Terminal-speed impact or a slow, painful demise?

[A] Newman: I don't think I really have a choice. It's much bigger than one person. Also, I'm not quite ready to go yet. [A sly smile creases his face] After all, salad dressing was just the beginning!

"I have that kind of personality. I just say, why not? Why not get into salad dressing? Why not race?"

"The blue-eyes stuff is offensive because of the implication that you'd be a failure without them."

"To be asked to do a commercial in this country is a sign that you're on the take or on the skids."