[2008.10.02]Paul Newman 保罗纽曼

THE eyes were blue. Cornflower blue, steel blue, ice blue. They smouldered through the soft-focus foliage in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” as he swayed on a bicycle with Katharine Ross on the handlebars. They stared beautifully in his middle-aged lawyer’s face as, in “The Verdict”, he was handed an enormous cheque which he refused to take. They were so blue that they registered even in black and white. As he stepped out of the ranch door in “Hud”, casually buttoning his shirt, or as he woke himself up in “The Hustler” for another frame with Minnesota Fats after 25 hours at the pool table, you could have sworn they glowed with the colour of some deep, distant sky.
他的双眼是蓝色的。蓝如矢车菊，如青钢，如冰蓝花。在《虎豹小霸王》中，当他载着坐在车扶手上的凯瑟琳•罗斯一摇一晃地骑车前行时，他的这双蓝眼睛透过了柔焦的树叶幽幽地燃着。在《大审判》中，当他拒绝了他人递给过来的一张巨额支票时，这双蓝眼睛在那中年律师的脸庞上发出优美的光芒。这双眼睛蓝得彻底，即便是在黑白片中人们也能感觉到这蓝色。当他在《原野铁汉》中踏出牧场的门，若无其事地解开衬衫，或在《江湖浪子》中，当他——在台球桌上连续征战25小时后——一觉醒来，同“明尼苏达胖子”再战一局时，你会发誓他双眼中的光芒犹如那遥远深邃的天色。

Paul Newman himself thought little of them. He hid them behind sunglasses, and sometimes asked his fans whether this was all they valued him for. His epitaph, he once said, should be “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”
保罗•纽曼自己对这些倒并不在意。他将这些都隐藏在墨镜之后，有时他还会问他的影迷们是不是仅仅因为这一点才会去喜欢他。他曾经说在自己的墓碑上应当刻上这样一句话“保罗•纽曼安息于此，他死时是个失败者，因为他的眼睛变成了棕色。”

He also thought little of those screen performances. Until the 1990s he could not bear to watch himself. He so hated his first appearance, swaddled in a toga in “The Silver Chalice” in 1954, that he took out an advertisement in Variety begging people not to see it. He despaired later that people seemed to like him as “the cocky hero and the smart-ass and the rake”. In the end, the only self-reinvention that completely pleased him was the grinning man on the label of “Newman’s Own” balsamic dressing. His sauces and snacks, sold for charity from 1982 onwards (“shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good”), turned him into the most generous individual, relative to his income, in the 20th-century history of the United States.
他也并不看好自己在大银幕上的表现。在90年代以前，他始终无法忍受观看自己主演的影片。在其处女作《圣杯》中，他被紧紧地裹在古罗马的大袍子里，他非常讨厌这一形象甚至专门在Variety制作了一则广告，恳求人们不要去看这部电影。随后，他绝望地发现自己所扮演的高傲的英雄，自作聪明的人物，以及浪子的形象反倒颇受人们的欢迎。后来，他推出了“纽曼私传(Newman’s Own)”牌沙拉酱。商标上那个笑脸盈盈的头像是最终唯一令他满意的自我形象的重塑。自1982年以来，他将销售沙拉酱、零食的收入大多都捐给了慈善事业（“为行公益，可以不顾体面的牟利”），这使他，相对于他的收入，成为20世纪的美国历史上最慷慨的人。

With looks like his, by turns as sultry as Marlon Brando’s or as wistful as James Dean’s, he could have been any number of romantic leads. Instead he played con men (“The Sting”), petty criminals (“Cool Hand Luke”), abusive husbands (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) and a string of tough but vulnerable outsiders. Even these had moments of electric sexiness: Fast Eddie in “The Hustler” stroking a baize table, Hud nibbling on a flower. But they also gulped the bourbon down. The typical landscape of a Newman film was the raw sidestreets of a city or the empty plains, in which a man would try to get a grip on an aimless, violent life. He chose such parts, not always for the best, because the role of anti-hero was a challenge and an act of defiance.
由于他时而像马龙•白兰度一样闷闷不乐，时而像詹姆斯•迪恩一样充满渴望，他完全可以主演任何一部爱情电影。然而，他却去扮演骗子（《骗中骗》），小罪犯（《铁窗喋血》），粗鲁的丈夫（《朱门巧妇》），还有一系列的局外人角色，他们虽然性格粗暴，但却十分脆弱。即便是这样的角色有时也会具有令人震撼的性感的一面：《江湖浪子》中艾迪抚摸着扑有台面呢的球桌，《原野铁汉》中他慢慢咬着一朵花儿。但他也会将波旁威士忌一饮而尽。纽曼出演的影片中典型的场景就是城市中粗犷的陋巷或是坦荡的平原。在这里，人试图驾驭一种漫无目的、狂野不羁的生活。他之所以选择这些角色并非总是为了最好，而是因为出演反英雄的角色是一个挑战，一种反抗的行为。

Celebrity bugged him in every aspect: the studio contract system, from which he rapidly escaped, the Hollywood gossip mill, from which he fled into long-term marriage, motor-racing and Connecticut, the loveless pressure for Oscars and nominations. All this was “rubbish”. He did not care whether his name was on the right or left of the poster, and bigger or smaller than Steve McQueen’s. He was unbothered when age began to furrow the brow and fill out the jowls. Unlike Robert Redford, his partner for both “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting”, he made no attempt to preserve his prettiness. Hollywood could deal with him as he was.
成为名人使他在各个方面都不胜其烦：电影公司要同他签订合同，他选择了挣脱这种束缚；好莱坞的流言蜚语令他不堪忍受，于是他把家安在了康涅狄格州，同他的妻子长相厮守，并将精力投入到赛车中；奥斯卡奖项和提名也无情的向他施加压力。在他看来，这些都是“破烂玩意儿”。他并不在乎自己的名字是出现在海报的左边还是右边，是比斯蒂夫•麦奎恩的字体要大一些或是小一些。当岁月流逝，皱纹爬上了他的额头，布满了他的脸庞，他也丝毫没有在意。他在《虎豹小霸王》和《骗中骗》的搭档罗伯特•雷德福总是试图使自己永葆青春，而他却总是顺其自然。好莱坞可以用他，仿佛他从未老过。

A bolt of lightning
一道闪电

Indifferent to stardom, he was modest too about how he had earned it. He picked up method acting at the Actors Studio in New York, but never felt it particularly worked for him. Acting was “fiction” to which his own experience—though he too fought with drink, broke up a marriage and had to face the death of a child—was “irrelevant”. His craft had grown on him at Kenyon College in the late 1940s, between football and beer-bouts that sometimes landed him in jail. He supposed he mostly wanted to escape a career in his father’s sporting-goods store in Cleveland.

由于对自己的明星身份毫不在意，他对自己的成名经历也是十分谦虚。他虽然在纽约的演员工作室里学习了方法演技，可是从未觉得它对自己有多少的帮助。虽然他经历丰富：他也同酗酒做过斗争，有过破裂的婚姻，他也不得不面对自己孩子的死亡；但是他认为表演只是“杜撰”，同自己的经历“毫不相干”。20世纪40年代末在肯扬学院学习期间，他热衷于橄榄球，也常常酗酒，因此有时会被关进监狱。正是这两者使他开始对表演产生了兴趣。他觉得他最不想做的就是在他父亲位于克利夫兰的体育用品商店里干活，希望能逃离那里。

Luck had made the difference to him. Luck to be spotted by talent scouts at Yale, and taken in 1952 to New York; luck to get into a hit show on Broadway; luck to be snapped up by Warner Brothers the next year; luck to be picked for his breakthrough film in 1956, about the boxer Rocky Graziano, because Dean, the first choice, had been killed in a car crash. The film was called “Somebody Up There Likes Me”. Mr Newman agreed; all his life, somebody did, from the blue eyes onwards.
好运使他脱颖而出。在耶鲁大学他被慧眼识珠的星探相中，并于1952年将他带往纽约；在那里，他又有幸在百老汇出演了一场舞台剧并引起轰动；第二年，他又被华纳兄弟公司签下；1956年的一部关于拳击手Rocky Graziano的影片《回头是岸》为他的表演生涯带来突破，因为当时的男主角的第一人选詹姆斯•迪恩因为车祸不幸逝世了。纽曼对此也表示认同。自打他有了一双蓝色的双眼，在他的一生中，的确有人在眷顾着他。

His urge to give something back grew out of that. It began as a joke, putting home-made salad dressing in an old wine bottle, tying it with a ribbon and giving it to friends. He made more and more, went into partnership, pressed cases on the local grocer, and in two years had a multi-million-dollar business. All profits after tax, more than $250m so far, went to charitable causes round the world, of which his favourite were his 11 Hole in the Wall Camps for children with life-threatening illnesses. There, freed from hospitals, they could “raise a little hell” for a while.
正是因为如此，他才急于作出回报。这始于一个玩笑，他将自家制作的沙拉酱装在一个旧酒瓶里再系上一个蝴蝶结送给自己的朋友们。后来他越做越多，和别人合伙成立了公司，并将产品在当地的杂货店里成箱的出售。两年左右的功夫，他们就把这做成了好几百万美元的大买卖。他把所有的税后收入都捐给了世界各地的慈善事业，到目前为止，已经捐款总额已经超过了两亿五千万美元。其中最令他满意的就是其为身患重病的儿童们组织的名为11 Hole in the Wall Camp夏令营（来源于《虎豹小霸王》中纽曼率领的那帮土匪帮派的名字“墙洞帮”Hole in the Wall ）。那里没有医院，因此孩子们可以尽情地玩耍（源自习语Hell of a time，这里指 good fun，就是“玩得很开心”。）

He liked to do the same. Mr Newman was not a man for plans; he preferred creative chaos. He saw himself first as an inventor, whether of sauces or parts. His favourite directors were those, like Sidney Lumet on “The Verdict”, who were open and responsive to his own fizzing ideas. Mr Redford, with whom he memorably jumped off a cliff and raced out of a mission into hundreds of Bolivian rifles, said he had “the attention span of a bolt of lightning”. That sense of a lightning-strike returned whenever the camera fixed on him, its blue-eyed boy.
他同样喜欢做这样的事情。纽曼不是一个循规蹈矩的人，他喜欢具有创造性的混乱。他觉得自己首先是一个发明家，不论是在沙拉酱方面还是在其他方面。他喜欢像执导《大审判》的西德尼•鲁麦特这样的导演，因为他对纽曼的层出不穷的想法非常宽容，并且积极做出回应。雷德福曾在影片中同纽曼一同跳下山崖，并冲入了数以百计的玻利维亚士兵当中。他说纽曼能“像闪电划过一样迅速、高效地将精力集中起来”。无论何时，只要摄像机镜头对着他，这种像闪电一般的感觉就会回到这位双眼湛蓝的男孩儿身上。

 

He also thought little of those screen performances. Until the 1990s he could not bear to watch himself. He so hated his first appearance, swaddled in a toga in “The Silver Chalice” in 1954, that he took out an advertisement in Variety begging people not to see it. He despaired later that people seemed to like him as “the cocky hero and the smart-ass and the rake”. In the end, the only self-reinvention that completely pleased him was the grinning man on the label of “Newman’s Own” balsamic dressing. His sauces and snacks, sold for charity from 1982 onwards (“shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good”), turned him into the most generous individual, relative to his income, in the 20th-century history of the United States.
他也并不看好自己在大银幕上的表现。在90年代以前，他始终无法忍受观看自己主演的影片。在其处女作《圣杯》中，他被紧紧地裹在古罗马的大袍子里，他非常讨厌这一形象甚至专门在Variety制作了一则广告，恳求人们不要去看这部电影。随后，他绝望地发现自己所扮演的高傲的英雄，自作聪明的人物，以及浪子的形象反倒颇受人们的欢迎。后来，他推出了“纽曼私传(Newman’s Own)”牌沙拉酱。商标上那个笑脸盈盈的头像是最终唯一令他满意的自我形象的重塑。自1982年以来，他将销售沙拉酱、零食的收入大多都捐给了慈善事业（“为行公益，可以不顾体面的牟利”），这使他，相对于他的收入，成为20世纪的美国历史上最慷慨的人。

With looks like his, by turns as sultry as Marlon Brando’s or as wistful as James Dean’s, he could have been any number of romantic leads. Instead he played con men (“The Sting”), petty criminals (“Cool Hand Luke”), abusive husbands (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) and a string of tough but vulnerable outsiders. Even these had moments of electric sexiness: Fast Eddie in “The Hustler” stroking a baize table, Hud nibbling on a flower. But they also gulped the bourbon down. The typical landscape of a Newman film was the raw sidestreets of a city or the empty plains, in which a man would try to get a grip on an aimless, violent life. He chose such parts, not always for the best, because the role of anti-hero was a challenge and an act of defiance.
由于他时而像马龙•白兰度一样闷闷不乐，时而像詹姆斯•迪恩一样充满渴望，他完全可以主演任何一部爱情电影。然而，他却去扮演骗子（《骗中骗》），小罪犯（《铁窗喋血》），粗鲁的丈夫（《朱门巧妇》），还有一系列的局外人角色，他们虽然性格粗暴，但却十分脆弱。即便是这样的角色有时也会具有令人震撼的性感的一面：《江湖浪子》中艾迪抚摸着扑有台面呢的球桌，《原野铁汉》中他慢慢咬着一朵花儿。但他也会将波旁威士忌一饮而尽。纽曼出演的影片中典型的场景就是城市中粗犷的陋巷或是坦荡的平原。在这里，人试图驾驭一种漫无目的、狂野不羁的生活。他之所以选择这些角色并非总是为了最好，而是因为出演反英雄的角色是一个挑战，一种反抗的行为。

Celebrity bugged him in every aspect: the studio contract system, from which he rapidly escaped, the Hollywood gossip mill, from which he fled into long-term marriage, motor-racing and Connecticut, the loveless pressure for Oscars and nominations. All this was “rubbish”. He did not care whether his name was on the right or left of the poster, and bigger or smaller than Steve McQueen’s. He was unbothered when age began to furrow the brow and fill out the jowls. Unlike Robert Redford, his partner for both “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting”, he made no attempt to preserve his prettiness. Hollywood could deal with him as he was.
成为名人使他在各个方面都不胜其烦：电影公司要同他签订合同，他选择了挣脱这种束缚；好莱坞的流言蜚语令他不堪忍受，于是他把家安在了康涅狄格州，同他的妻子长相厮守，并将精力投入到赛车中；奥斯卡奖项和提名也无情的向他施加压力。在他看来，这些都是“破烂玩意儿”。他并不在乎自己的名字是出现在海报的左边还是右边，是比斯蒂夫•麦奎恩的字体要大一些或是小一些。当岁月流逝，皱纹爬上了他的额头，布满了他的脸庞，他也丝毫没有在意。他在《虎豹小霸王》和《骗中骗》的搭档罗伯特•雷德福总是试图使自己永葆青春，而他却总是顺其自然。好莱坞可以用他，仿佛他从未老过。

A bolt of lightning
一道闪电

Indifferent to stardom, he was modest too about how he had earned it. He picked up method acting at the Actors Studio in New York, but never felt it particularly worked for him. Acting was “fiction” to which his own experience—though he too fought with drink, broke up a marriage and had to face the death of a child—was “irrelevant”. His craft had grown on him at Kenyon College in the late 1940s, between football and beer-bouts that sometimes landed him in jail. He supposed he mostly wanted to escape a career in his father’s sporting-goods store in Cleveland.

由于对自己的明星身份毫不在意，他对自己的成名经历也是十分谦虚。他虽然在纽约的演员工作室里学习了方法演技，可是从未觉得它对自己有多少的帮助。虽然他经历丰富：他也同酗酒做过斗争，有过破裂的婚姻，他也不得不面对自己孩子的死亡；但是他认为表演只是“杜撰”，同自己的经历“毫不相干”。20世纪40年代末在肯扬学院学习期间，他热衷于橄榄球，也常常酗酒，因此有时会被关进监狱。正是这两者使他开始对表演产生了兴趣。他觉得他最不想做的就是在他父亲位于克利夫兰的体育用品商店里干活，希望能逃离那里。

Luck had made the difference to him. Luck to be spotted by talent scouts at Yale, and taken in 1952 to New York; luck to get into a hit show on Broadway; luck to be snapped up by Warner Brothers the next year; luck to be picked for his breakthrough film in 1956, about the boxer Rocky Graziano, because Dean, the first choice, had been killed in a car crash. The film was called “Somebody Up There Likes Me”. Mr Newman agreed; all his life, somebody did, from the blue eyes onwards.
好运使他脱颖而出。在耶鲁大学他被慧眼识珠的星探相中，并于1952年将他带往纽约；在那里，他又有幸在百老汇出演了一场舞台剧并引起轰动；第二年，他又被华纳兄弟公司签下；1956年的一部关于拳击手Rocky Graziano的影片《回头是岸》为他的表演生涯带来突破，因为当时的男主角的第一人选詹姆斯•迪恩因为车祸不幸逝世了。纽曼对此也表示认同。自打他有了一双蓝色的双眼，在他的一生中，的确有人在眷顾着他。

His urge to give something back grew out of that. It began as a joke, putting home-made salad dressing in an old wine bottle, tying it with a ribbon and giving it to friends. He made more and more, went into partnership, pressed cases on the local grocer, and in two years had a multi-million-dollar business. All profits after tax, more than $250m so far, went to charitable causes round the world, of which his favourite were his 11 Hole in the Wall Camps for children with life-threatening illnesses. There, freed from hospitals, they could “raise a little hell” for a while.
正是因为如此，他才急于作出回报。这始于一个玩笑，他将自家制作的沙拉酱装在一个旧酒瓶里再系上一个蝴蝶结送给自己的朋友们。后来他越做越多，和别人合伙成立了公司，并将产品在当地的杂货店里成箱的出售。两年左右的功夫，他们就把这做成了好几百万美元的大买卖。他把所有的税后收入都捐给了世界各地的慈善事业，到目前为止，已经捐款总额已经超过了两亿五千万美元。其中最令他满意的就是其为身患重病的儿童们组织的名为11 Hole in the Wall Camp夏令营（来源于《虎豹小霸王》中纽曼率领的那帮土匪帮派的名字“墙洞帮”Hole in the Wall ）。那里没有医院，因此孩子们可以尽情地玩耍（源自习语Hell of a time，这里指 good fun，就是“玩得很开心”。）

He liked to do the same. Mr Newman was not a man for plans; he preferred creative chaos. He saw himself first as an inventor, whether of sauces or parts. His favourite directors were those, like Sidney Lumet on “The Verdict”, who were open and responsive to his own fizzing ideas. Mr Redford, with whom he memorably jumped off a cliff and raced out of a mission into hundreds of Bolivian rifles, said he had “the attention span of a bolt of lightning”. That sense of a lightning-strike returned whenever the camera fixed on him, its blue-eyed boy.
他同样喜欢做这样的事情。纽曼不是一个循规蹈矩的人，他喜欢具有创造性的混乱。他觉得自己首先是一个发明家，不论是在沙拉酱方面还是在其他方面。他喜欢像执导《大审判》的西德尼•鲁麦特这样的导演，因为他对纽曼的层出不穷的想法非常宽容，并且积极做出回应。雷德福曾在影片中同纽曼一同跳下山崖，并冲入了数以百计的玻利维亚士兵当中。他说纽曼能“像闪电划过一样迅速、高效地将精力集中起来”。无论何时，只要摄像机镜头对着他，这种像闪电一般的感觉就会回到这位双眼湛蓝的男孩儿身上。