NEWMAN’S RACE FOR PRIVACY

Paul Newman is in a great mood. He slept well, the weather’s perfect, and he’s looking forward to a repeat of the previous morning’s run through the thick birch woods that surround Gull Lake in central Minnesota.

“That was the best run of my life,” Newman said Friday morning. “The woods are gorgeous. I even saw a deer. It was fabulous.”

It’s now Saturday, qualifying day at Brainerd International Raceway where three years ago, in a rainstorm, Newman won his only professional auto race. Everyone on the Nissan Racing Team, including the driver, thinks this may be the weekend when he wins his second.

Newman spent Thursday and Friday evenings at another lake with friends, barbecuing sausages and hot dogs, drinking Budweiser, popping his own brand of gourmet popcorn and darting across the water in exhilarating 90-m.p.h. speedboats.

Yes, this is the place. Quiet, rural, pristine. A spot where anyone--even a movie star of magnitude 10--can jog down a one-lane dirt road and have the world to himself. At least, that deer didn’t recognize him.

“This is terrific,” Newman says, as he emerges from his first-floor bedroom in the $250,000 condominium he’s sharing for the weekend with two race associates and a reporter. “When I got up this morning, the movie star in me said, ‘Don’t make the bed.’ The mother in me said, ‘Make the bed.’ So, I compromised. I made half of it.”

A few minutes later, he takes a deep breath, tugs on the bill of a cap that has “Nissan Racing” stenciled across the top, then jogs off on those spindly legs toward the woods . . . and an encounter that will nearly ruin his day.

This time, he doesn’t have the road to himself. A woman and a teen-age boy have staked out the trail, and they spot him.

“I can’t believe the insensitivity of some people,” Newman says, returning with a face as red from anger as from exercise. “You’d think they’d at least leave a person alone when he’s running.”

Newman says the woman first pulled alongside him in her car while the boy leaned out the window and tried to put a camera in his face. Then they doubled back and waited for him on the road.

“She’s standing there when I come back and says, ‘Hey, I buy your salad dressing, let us get a picture.’ I said, ‘Well, isn’t this great. It’s a beautiful morning out here, I’m having a nice run and I have to run into two (bleeps) like you.’ ”

At 60, Newman is still fighting the trappings of fame. Still hoping to go outside and be left alone. Still repelled by the aggressiveness of people who ask for his autograph, or ask him to pose, or demand that he take off his sunglasses so they can peer into his Technicolor eyes.

“I feel like saying, ‘Show me your gums,’ ” he says. “There’s nothing like it to make you feel like a piece of meat.”

To be in Newman’s inner circle for a weekend is to observe some very unattractive behavior on the perimeter. Young girls still clutch each other and shriek when he walks by. Men stare, then nervously adjust the focus on their cameras. Mothers send their children, who don’t know Paul Newman from Neiman-Marcus, to ask for his autograph. Occasionally, women will even hoist their blouses as he maneuvers his race car through the crowd.

“It ain’t love,” jokes one of Newman’s crew members, “but it’s intimate.”

Newman has always been annoyed by celebrity worshipers, whether on a movie set, at a political rally or at a race track. Legend has it that someone tried to hand him a pencil and paper while he was at a urinal during a political rally years ago, and he hasn’t signed autographs since.

Newman just shakes his head when asked about it, as if it’s something that happens every day.

“You wouldn’t believe. . . ,” he says, his voice trailing off.

Newman spends most of his time at the race track in a rented motor home--napping, talking strategy with car owner Bob Sharp, entertaining friends and reading movie scripts--while fans wait outside, six deep at the busier tracks, for him to come out.

When he does, the Nissan Racing Team compound becomes a magnet. People collect like horseflies and fix their eyes on him until he’s gone.

Newman rarely looks back, but he is always aware, always uneasy, about their being there. Once, he was rubbing ice cubes on his racing gloves to stiffen the leather, and someone behind him said, “So, that’s why they call you Cool Hand Luke.”

Newman repeated the line all weekend; he thought it was hilarious. But when it happened, he didn’t even turn around to see where it came from, as if the attention would only encourage more dialogue. Lee Trevino, he’s not.

“You start that (singing autographs and chatting with fans) and that’s all you’ll do,” he says.

To Newman’s competitors, some of whom are still teen-agers, Newman’s stardom is less a curiosity than his age. Racing is a young man’s sport, a game of nerve and quick reflexes, and few remain competitive beyond 40.

Newman, who got the bug while playing a driver in the 1969 film “Winning,” was 47 when he took his first lesson, hoping to get a license, he says, and race in amateur events near his home in Westport, Conn. What happened since has been covered in the sports pages: two national championships; a second-place finish in the 24 Hours of Le Mans; a professional win at Brainerd’s 1982 Trans-Am.

“It is phenomenal what he’s done,” says Sharp, a retired racer who is still younger than Newman was when he began. “You can wonder how good he would have been if he’d raced as a young man, but why bother. Look how good he is now.”

This weekend, he’s only as good as the tires on his car, a turbocharged Nissan 300-ZX. And Newman, after setting the third-fastest time during Saturday’s qualifying runs, will finish sixth on Sunday. He is now seventh in point standings in the Trans-Am series, and the team has earned less than $15,000 in prize money. (Not to worry: The team receives heavy financial support from Nissan and other sponsors, and Newman supplies all the popcorn and salad dressing they can eat.)

Newman is inevitably asked to compare racing and acting, and inevitably finds no comparison.

“I think one has to do with physical grace and one has to do with artistic grace,” he says, during a break between Saturday’s qualifying sessions. “One is definite, one is not. When you cross the finish line first in a race, you’ve won, no argument. I’ve crossed the finish line first in my own head in a lot of artistic endeavors and didn’t get doodle-e-squat.”

Maybe not doodle-e-squat, but six Oscar nominations--two of them during the last five years, for “Absence of Malice” and “The Verdict.”

With those successes, with his racing program in high gear and with a salad dressing company that by the end of this year will have pumped nearly $10 million into various community, charity and educational programs, one might think of these as Newman’s real salad days.

Just the reverse, he says. His last movie, “Harry and Son,” was poorly received, and the scripts he’s reading are worse than ever. And as successful as the salad dressing company is, the need to work is greater than ever.

“I have to work for three reasons,” he says. “Because I believe the equipment rusts if you don’t use it. Because I have to feel productive at the end of each week. And because I somehow have to support the salad dressing business.”

Curiously, Newman’s salad dressing company, established on a lark with the thought that any profits would go to charity, is providing him--on paper--with more income than he gets from his movies. It is very complicated tax law, but essentially, he says, in order to give away his salad dressing profits, he has to increase his personal income. Otherwise, money that would go to charities goes to taxes, and by extension, to promote programs Newman disagrees with.

“I’m not anxious to contribute to the ‘Star Wars’ program and this military budget,” he says, launching into a 10-minute tirade about Reagan, nuclear armaments and the military-industrial complex. “The biggest satisfaction (about the salad dressing company) is that our fiscal year happens to come at the end of December, so all our allocations are given away just before Christmas.

“That whole thing about mercantile greed and corruption I filled my heart with every year at Christmas has been changed into an entirely different emotion. I actually feel some of that spirit of Christmas.”

Newman says he would like to act in two movies a year, or direct one. But nothing worthwhile has come along to fill those long winters between race seasons.

“The actor, like the driver, is held hostage by his equipment,” he says. “The scripts just aren’t there. I’ve done two movies in four years. Dustin (Hoffman) has done one. Redford has done one. . . . We may be dinosaurs for all we know. What it costs to make a movie is changing, what studios are willing to put money up for, that’s changing. The audience is changing.”

Newman says the audience is changing because of the complexity of modern issues coupled with TV’s lowest-common-denominator programming and the blockbuster mentality of the film studios.

“I think that the more people find history out of control, the more they want to be entertained, and the less they want to think. So, they’re given less, and the less they’re given, the less they demand.”

Newman sags back on a cushion and appears tired for the first time this weekend. Racing is invigorating, he says, even when he loses. Even when he has to put up with crowds. But reading the scripts being written these days . . . that’s work.

“It’s a very dry season, that’s all,” he says, picking up his helmet, and stepping out of the motor home.

Everyone noticed.