A cranky Kevin Costner and a resilient Uma Thurman: 5 juicy stories from Maureen Dowd’s ‘Notorious’ interviews
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On the Shelf
Notorious
By Maureen Dowd
Harper: 400 pages, $32.50
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Maureen Dowd has been profiling the rich, famous and powerful for the New York Times since the 1980s. As she writes in her new collection, “Notorious,” “I’ve always been fascinated by how powerful people wield power, how charismatic people create charisma, how talented people nurture or squander their talent.” She has a knack for asking questions that go right up to the edge of intrusion but instead yield thoughtful, intimate insights.
“Notorious” features conversations with everyone from Uma Thurman to Elon Musk, from Paul Newman to Mel Brooks. We picked five of the juiciest tidbits and anecdotes.
“They say life is just a series of snapshots,” Dowd writes. “This book certainly is. It’s pioneering, talented, brilliant people at a certain moment in their lives — and those moments can be illuminating.”
Kevin Costner: Never meet your heroes
Dowd confesses that Costner was once a “big crush” of hers. That was before she interviewed him in 1991 in New Orleans.
“Things got off to a bad start as we were walking through the French Quarter to his hotel for the interview,” Dowd writes. “A group of sweet seniors shyly asked Costner to pose for a picture with them as he waited at a red light, tapping his cowboy boot in irritation.”
“OK,” he snapped at the women, “but can’t you see I’m being interviewed?”
Dowd writes: ”It was like watching someone kick kittens.” As the interview progressed, Costner asked Dowd, “with cocky assurance,” if she was going to play the interview tape for her girlfriends. “I told him starchily, ‘I interviewed Paul Newman and didn’t play that tape for my girlfriends. So I think I can refrain from playing yours.’”
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Jane Fonda: Sexual healing denied
When Dowd interviewed Jane Fonda in 2020, she asked the movie star/workout queen/bête noire of the right wing if she wanted to have sex with Che Guevara. “No, I don’t think about him,” Fonda replied. “Who I do think about, and what is a great regret, is Marvin Gaye. He wanted to and I didn’t. I was married to Tom [Hayden]. I was meeting a lot of performers to try to do concerts for Tom and the woman who was helping me do that introduced me to Marvin Gaye.”
Dowd: “Please tell me his pickup line included the words ‘sexual healing.’”
Fonda: “I needed some but he didn’t say that, no. But then I read, apparently he had my picture on his refrigerator. I didn’t find that out until later, after he was dead.”
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Paul Newman: The eyes (don’t) have it
One of my favorite pieces in “Notorious” is Dowd’s profile of Newman. Published in 1986, shortly before the release of “The Color of Money” (for which he would finally win his first Oscar), the story shows Newman to be a relatable and humorous conversation partner — and very self-conscious about being seen as a sex symbol. It is worth quoting at length.
“To the public, the actor’s cerulean eyes have become a symbol of his stardom. To Newman, they have become a symbol of his long struggle to be thought of as a craftsman. ‘To work as hard as I’ve worked to accomplish anything and then have some yo-yo come up and say, ‘Take off those dark glasses and let’s have a look at those blue eyes’ is really discouraging.
“It’s as though someone said, ‘Open your mouth and let me see your gums,’ or ‘Open your blouse and let me see your chest.’ The thing I’ve never figured out is, how do you present eyes? Do you present them coyly? Do you present them boldly? Usually, I just say, ‘I would take off my sunglasses, madam, but my pants would fall down.’”
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Uma Thurman: Death proof
In Dowd’s 2018 profile of Thurman, the actress talks about dangerous encounters with two men. One is Harvey Weinstein, whose sexual assaults have been well chronicled (Thurman “wriggled” away from his attacks). The other is Quentin Tarantino, who, Thurman says, had her drive an unsafe car on the set of “Kill Bill,” which she crashed and was left badly injured.
“Uma Thurman said she didn’t want to drive this car,” Dowd writes. “She said she had been warned that there were issues with it. She felt she had to do it anyway.”
“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” Thurman says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m never going to walk again.’ When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”
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Daniel Craig: Is the Wi-Fi working?
“Oftentimes,” Dowd writes, “famous people are just giving you a well-rehearsed riff that they’ve given thousands of times before. But sometimes, you can lead them to some weird subject that gets them off script. And occasionally, they’ll simply surprise you.”
One such surprise came in 2013, when Dowd interviewed Craig.
“The very cool Daniel Craig told me that he and Rachel Weisz had a ban on technology devices in the bedroom and recommended that for everyone,” she writes. “’If the iPad goes to bed, I mean, unless you’re both watching porn on the internet, it’s a killer,’” he said.
And scene.
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