I had read that Paul Newman disliked journalists and hated being interviewed, especially by women. I’d read all about the long method pause. How conversation wasn’t going to flow, how answers were often terse and enigmatic. I read how in one interview he used the cutlery and the crockery on the table to almost build a wall between himself and the interviewer. That he’s defensive, he’s shifty, and he purposely hides the piercing blue intimacy of his eyes in dark glasses. It’s as if he hates himself for having those eyes.

He once said: “If people come up to me, perfect strangers, and ask me to take off my dark glasses so they can have a look at my eyes, I just say, ‘Is that all you think of me?’ Are they going to write on my tombstone, ‘Here lies Paul Newman who died a failure because his eyes turned brown’?”

Another time he snapped: “If people start treating you like a piece of meat or a long lost friend or feel they can become cuddly for the price of a $5 movie ticket, then you shut them out.”

But you think, so what? All the most interesting people are difficult. You think they must have just been bad interviewers, or he was having a bad day. I think that it’s not going to happen to me because I have a special connection with him. I loved him in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof more than anyone else did. I was so touched by his sullen passion, it must mean something. Even if it doesn’t. He is the last legend that’s still alive. The last big star that still has a life running through him. He still is the ultimate, the perfect butch American beauty. And now, after the announcement a couple of years ago that he would retire from acting, Sam Mendes has tempted him back on the screen with Road to Perdition.

It’s set in Chicago gangster land. A tale of the conflict of being a moral person in an immoral world, a triumph of good over evil, and a long decision-making process to decide which is which. It’s about fathers and sons, redemption, revenge, and deals with violence in a way that has spectacular emotional resonance.

The movie is being screened to a set of international journalists for the first time in Chicago, then Newman is to give a press conference and I am to get the only one-on-one, person-to-person meeting with the man. You don’t think that this might be difficult, you think that it’s an honour. There are not many people I would fly to Chicago for, there and back in 36 hours. But it’s Paul Newman for God’s sake.

The screening of Road to Perdition has everyone astonished and talking of Oscars. Newman is the grandfather, the father, the godfather type. I wonder if the frail but strong, brittle but whimsical is him or the character. He’s playing an old man, but is he. Hard to think of him as 77, still racing his cars around the track, winning even. I am told the week before he just closed in his first stage play for several decades, a local thing in Connecticut where he lives. You don’t want to think of him as old.

A German journalist tells me: “I hear you have the jewel in the crown. Can I buy you a drink?” Credibility by association, I’m pleased with this. That night, serendipitously, on one of the movie channels in the hotel Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes on. And there he is, the epitome of that very masculine cool with the capacity for hard living, taming the Wild West, making a comedy out of tragedy. Daring, cool, exciting. Giving Robert Redford’s lady Katharine Ross short shrift and the look of love at the same time. His charisma encompasses chivalry and chauvinism. And we know him to be both dangerous and safe.

All this and a good guy, right. All those spaghetti sauces, their giant profits, with their motto, “Shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good”, and Newman’s own smiling face. All the profits, somewhere between $50m-$100m since their conception in 1982, goes to various charities and setting up Hole In The Wall Gang camps for desperately sick children. He’s also legendary for having the longest surviving marriage in Hollywood. He’s been married to Joanne Woodward for 43 years. That always fascinates people. Not just because he likes meat and she’s a vegetarian, he likes racing and she likes ballet, she is a southern belle, he’s from second generation German Jewish stock. He once said, “She’s nitro-glycerine and I’m diesel fuel.”

What of course he rarely mentions these days are the sparks that flew between them in their smouldering eight-year courtship while he was married to Jacqueline Witte, and was torn apart, the moral man that he is, by his decision to leave her and his three young children.

I’ll find out all about the dynamics of that later, when I get to meet him. I drop in on the press conference, more to see how he deals with a press conference than for what he’s got to say. There he is, alone on the podium, looking reasonably comfortable and extremely ironed. He doesn’t look as old and as slow as his character in the movie, he doesn’t look grandfatherly.

But does he look 77? And what does looking 77 really mean?

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