THE BELL CURVE:

In the years I covered the Hollywood beat for the Wall Street Journal’s weekly National Observer I did a half-dozen profiles of Paul Newman, so reading his obituaries last week took me through a whole mother lode of memories. Good memories. With Newman, you got either the whole package or nothing at all. With access came one cardinal rule, nothing personal, and one permanent attitude: a jaundiced view of his own importance.

He once told me: “Some people in my business have that incredible capacity to be a star off the screen. I don’t knock it; I stand in awe of it, but I also know that’s not part of my nature. I don’t like that kind of invention. I’m bewildered by it. The whole idea of being public property bugs me. People who see me that way don’t want to know me. They just want to get close to a movie star.”

Almost from the beginning of his success as an actor, Newman did interviews only if they related to work he wanted to be seen, or social and political causes in which he was invested. And for the last two decades of his life, he didn’t do interviews at all. He preferred to be seen in the massive good works he did — especially his Hole in the Wall Gang camps and the community theaters he supported — with the considerable profits from his salad dressing and the line of products that followed.

Given this antipathy toward talking about himself, the only way for even a truncated biographer to get any real sense of the interior man was to have the opportunity to hang out with Newman in his own environment. To this end, the most comfortable batch of time I had with him was in Indianapolis where he was playing the role of a race car driver — a consuming passion with Newman — in a movie called “Winning.”

Indianapolis — home of the seminal 500-mile auto race — was not accustomed to having movie stars in residence, even briefly, and so hundreds of local citizens hung out in a scorching hot grandstand for glimpses of Newman. If they popped out of the stands and approached him for pictures he could duck into the car pits. And did.

Talking with his head in an engine was easy and comfortable, and he would bring that comfort back to his trailer where he would sit on the steps with a beer and talk with a visiting journalist. Talk with Newman was two-way. He listens well. But on this day, many years ago in the late ’60s, he wanted to talk about the damage done his films by “administrative mentalities not really equipped” to judge his work.

This was an especially sensitive subject at the time because he was still smarting from “putting my taste up against eight major studios” that turned a cold shoulder to a small film about a 35-year-old school teacher who was watching life pass her by that Newman wanted badly to direct. The sour attitude turned glowing when he described how “Rachel, Rachel,” lacking promotion or attention from the studio that finally made it, was nominated for four Academy Awards and seen finally as an underrated classic.

“The studios were all looking for what they called wide-spectrum films,” Newman said. “But to me, the character of Rachel was much more identifiable than most of the humans dealt with on the screen today. I believe that no matter how small and unstageworthy it appears, the public is interested in that sort of examination — and with what people in the tract houses have to contend with daily. And nobody,” he concluded with satisfaction, “is allowed to cut Rachel. If the TV hackers ever get at it, I can make things pretty rough for them.”

When we adjourned to his suite at an Indianapolis hotel, it reminded me of the tract house analogy, full of life, energy and confusion. A small blond daughter named Lissie was playing with a kitten who, she announced, “can do tricks like a dog.” Newman watched a performance while brothers and agents wandered in and out and his wife, actress Joanne Woodward, fussed at him to pack for a trip to New York to join an antiwar rally he had helped to organize with a coterie of other actors.

He had time to scoff at his role as a revolutionary. “You can’t just take that on part time,” he said. “But I don’t want to cop out, either. If I’m ever going to be a revolutionary, I’d like it to be about pollution. We may have passed the point of no return already. But if I wait too long, I’ll lose my power base as an actor.”

If that indeed happened, it was because he preferred it that way. He kept his hand in as an occasional director and actor as he withdrew behind his beloved causes. The last time I saw him was when he directed Joanne in “The Shadow Box,” a film about the importance of using our time in this life now and not waiting until some shadowy tomorrow or until we are facing death

I was doing a magazine piece about Joanne, and he had retreated behind the no-interview edict, aided and abetted by a determination not to divert the focus on his wife. He finally grudgingly allowed that he was “really tired of seeing Joanne play funky housewives when she is actually a functioning voluptuary. All you have to do is give her a chance to stretch a little — and that was probably the most important reason I decided to do this.”

They were less than a year away from a Golden Anniversary — with Joanne still protesting the burden of being regarded as “some sort of ideal couple” — when Paul died last week. Perhaps she should have the last word here: “Paul,” she said, “is a star — even though he’s one hell of a character actor, too. Paul doesn’t take himself that seriously, but the incandescence is there, anyway. There’s an aura that hangs around such people.”

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.