Goldman on Newman

When Lady L was done, Newman returned to his home in Connecticut and Kastner took me up to a crucial meeting: Changes were needed and were they the kind of alterations I could accommodate. (If I hadn't, by the way, I would have been gone and someone else would have done them. If Newman's interest would hold. Stars like Newman get offered everything practically every day, and if a situation begins to get messy, they can get turned off. Quickly.

Paul Newman is the least starlike superstar I've ever worked with. He's an educated man and a trained actor and he never wants more close-ups. What he wants is the best possible script and character he can have. And he loves to be surrounded by the finest actors available, because he believes the better they are, the better the picture's apt to be, the better he'll come out. Many stars, maybe even most, don't want that competition.

We walked the back lanes of Westport and it all went well. But what I remember most about it was that Newman carried a handful of pebbles and I noticed that whenever a car drove by, he was always in the act of tossing a pebble into the woods, so that his back was to the street. It's hard not to notice Paul Newman and he was doing all he could to talk and not be stared at.

With Newman set, Kastner and I drove back to the city and on the way he said, "You don't know what happened, do you?" I said I didn't. He told me the following: "You just jumped past all the shit."

And he was right. I was no longer a putz novelist from New York. Now I was a putz novelist who had written a Paul Newman picture. Any first credit in Hollywood is tremendously meaningful. When that credit involves pleasing a major star, you can square that import.

from Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983)