Paul Newman’s set was a happy set. The weather was good, the actors were kind to each other and every day at 3, three or four giant Hefty bags of popcorn made by the director showed up. The movie seemed small while Newman was directing it—not big, like Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, or Martin Ritt’s Hud, or the dappled George Roy Hill bookends of Butch Cassidy and The Sting, or Sidney Lumet’s great Boston courtroom drama, The Verdict. And it stayed that way on the screen, but the scenes Newman directed with his wife had (and continue to have) a depth and romantic warmth that broke a kind of sunlight over the rest of the film. My memory of the director and his wife—with his taut, focused affection and her internal discipline, goodwill and generous warmth—was watching an undemonstrative, unbroken marital choreography of intimacy and regard. Newman implausibly died at the end of the movie, but you’ve never seen an expiree so tanned and vital. It seemed impossible that his corpse wouldn’t come back in the last reel and whip all the other actors in a speed-round of tennis.

After the shooting weeks, I went to see him race his cars in Georgia: a movie actor doing his best to escape the fetid weight of fame, enduring a hovering reporter from Life, which even in its diminished state was still a name he had to put up with. He was completely consumed with his racing team. One afternoon I met him at his motel, in Athens, to drive him into Atlanta to meet his wife. He came out of his motor court door looking like the usual trillion bucks and had big racing sunglasses on. It must have been around 5; he said he was late for dinner with Joanne. I told him we’d get there faster if he drove; I have to admit, I wanted to see what my budget-priced rental car would feel like being handled by Paul Newman.

It shuddered and kicked into motion: the stodgy 1983 rental—like the Pixar vehicle he gave voice to as Doc Hudson in Cars—suddenly perked up, smiled and seemed to remember it had more of a romantic, internally combusted purpose in life than being driven by pishers like me. Newman took charge and gunned it on the Interstate into Atlanta, driving the Plymouth rather seriously. He talked about his kids, the movie, Pier Angeli—the sad beauty he had acted with in his first stinker, The Silver Chalice, and his breakthrough picture, Somebody Up There Likes Me—and most of all his wife. We roared into the parking garage of the Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, a glass-walled 73-story signature-of-the-New-South hotel where Mrs. Newman was apparently in the top turret, Penelope waiting for
Odysseus.

We hurtled up to the vast store level of the mall. He was determined to buy a present for his wife, and it must have been 6:02, because we heard the click-click-click of New South mall shopkeepers locking their doors. Newman went to the glass door of the Peachtree Plaza jewelry store and banged on it while the hard-nosed lady manager stood on the other side of the door and shook her head, no. Then slowly, deliberately, unsheathing the weapon of last resort, he lifted the sunglasses and let them drop so that they dangled from one ear. The lady shopkeeper stood frozen as the blues stared at her through the security glass.

The door unbolted.

Paul Newman never made a case for himself beyond his mortal decency, which made him the sanest of stars. Eventually he turned into Paul Newman the crusty superstar, who showed up on David Letterman’s first Late Night program on CBS in 1993 and demanded, “Where the hell are the singing cats?” before sprinting to the street. The last time I saw him was up in Westport, Conn., at the musty old narrow summer stock theater where he played the Stage Manager in Our Town, much more a member of the Westport community than Hollywood legend. It was a deeply democratic performance, the Stage Manager less as omniscient codger than as another slightly addled human.

Almost at the end of the play, standing in the dark in his collar and vest, he got to answer Emily’s big question as she surveys her former life from beyond: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”

“No—” the Stage Manager says, “Saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”

Paul Newman came close on both.

pkaplan@observer.com

Clay would sit at the Waldorf and dictate. His Felkerian takes on the world, as many have said, added up to a nonfiction novel embodying Clay’s worldview: power was his subject, exuberance was his drive. His giant eyes would widen, he would occasionally raise one eyebrow like the English actor Denholm Elliott and proclaim a subject news. There was the occasional Felkerian yelp of laughter: HA! Or the Felkerian feigning of disgust, very G.I. in its manly lack of four-letterness: CHRRR-IST!

There were Felkerian adages:

1. Never hold your best stuff.

2. Put something shocking at the top of the page.

3. Women are the best reporters.

4. Point of view is everything.

5. Personal is better.

6. Never hold your best stuff.

There were instructions about calling writers, some of them too young, some too old, some cronies, some princes, some just right. There were design edicts about tearing the front page into pieces, using more illustration, less photography, bigger type. There were declarations about making the paper more “female,” with more ideas.

“It’s a newspaper of interpretation,” he used to say. Then: “Point of view is everything.”

The last statement is as true as anything I know about the kind of journalism Clay Felker taught a generation of reporters and editors. For him, point of view was everything. It was not only an edict, it was a revolution. Clay came from a generation that was killing the newspaper writer, in which the dominance of The New York Times and the mystical insularity of William Shawn’s New Yorker were so powerful that the blaring, clattering bumptiousness of New York newspapers that had come to dominate the press in the 19th century through the Menckenian 1920s was being squashed into a white-collar, gray-suited blur.

Clay Felker, of Webster Groves, Mo., son of the managing editor of The Sporting News and the women’s editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, of Duke University, of Life, Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune, had a different point of view. Somewhere on this earth and even within this city there are still men and women who remember when Clay Felker was a giant with a delicate smile whose melodic, brassy belt could stop New York cold; there are a fewer who remember before that, when he still was a jostling, ambitious, impossible tyro, whose ambition—which he would turn into a journalistic petrochemical—was still burbling: he was the young Life magazine reporter who ended Joe DiMaggio’s reign in center field at Yankee Stadium by proving that his arm was ailing. Clay liked to tell the story of Gary Cooper showing up at a photo shoot near the end of his life and creating the illusion of vitality with an almost indiscernible move of the tip of his cowboy boot.

But nothing Clay did was a tiny tip of a boot. Clay reinvented the American magazine in New York magazine with huge type and big noises, journalistic ambition, the salvaged egg he pulled from the ashes of the collapsed Herald Tribune. Vitality was his game, ambition was his fuel, manliness was his strength. As a younger man, he was a blasting force of nature; as an older man, he became the sweetheart of the Western world, beloved to students, girl reporters and acolytes.

He reinvented the American magazine, not just in New York with New York, but with his noise and chest-bumping assault on the power structures in the city. Clay Felker, who you may not have heard of, but who was the last great magazine editor of the 20th century, was a strange amalgam of exuberance, innocence and pragmatism.

His greatness may come down to at least these two things: He re-infused New York City with a sense of itself as the bourgeois capital of the world at exactly the moment the world was counting the city out. And he gave journalists a sense that they were up to the task of remaking the world. He gave reporters—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Richard Reeves, Ken Auletta, Jimmy Breslin, refugees from newspapers and politics—the sense that they were writers who could change the world. One of Clay’s great powers was that he knew that an editor’s task was chest-bumpingly governmental: to make a journalist feel supported by a power greater than him- or herself.

He was the master of exploded limits, of potential and untrammeled exuberance. With Milton Glaser and a jolly team of magazine heroes, people like Byron Dobell, Walter Bernard, Judy Daniels, Sheldon Zalaznick and Joan Kron, he made New York the ritziest burg in the Western world, a town of celebrity, royalty, beautiful women, Power Games, posh restaurants, mayors who looked like movie stars, a city redeemed by its exuberance, security, flamboyance. It was a town of Saturday Night Fevers, Sunday afternoon brunches and Monday morning quarterbacks.

I met Clay when I was 22, and he took me to lunch at the Four Seasons when I was 23. I’ll never forget, he tied a napkin around his neck in the Pool Room and ordered a giant “Mom’s stew.” I finally worked with him at Manhattan, inc., a business magazine he edited in the 1980s just before the bubble burst. The staff, particularly the younger staff, adored him. He sent his brilliant acolytes off on San Francisco assignments and put them up in big hotels, brought Tom Wolfe into the office and consorted with Sir James Goldsmith in high operatic tones on the telephone. Once when a staff writer moonlighted without telling them and went on vacation, he had her books and office effects packed and messengered to her apartment so that when she returned to the magazine it was as she had never been born.

He ate with mysterious speed and voraciousness, talking the whole time. The staff took bets on if they could catch Clay eating—he ingested food so quickly that once he sat down and strapped his napkin around his neck and began talking, the next thing you knew, poof! The plate was empty. One of the terrible cruelties of Clay’s disease was that in time it stripped him of his voice, which was a beautiful thing; a brass instrument that fell somewhere between adenoidal croon and bel canto tenor. “Listen,” he would often begin a sentence, and what followed was a long, unfurled tumbling of sheet music that was a deeply informed stream-of-c
onsciousness of story ideas creating a simultaneously journalistic and mythological New York, populated by heroes and scoundrels, duchesses and beauties, all driven by the same Felkerian spur of ambition.

But then something amazing happened: He became a man who seemed, as he grew older, to become younger and younger. His eyes were always big and almost innocent, now his demeanor became more curious and less declarative. He would get a beatific smile when he was speaking to his students, even though he still roared around Berkeley in an open-topped English racer, wearing leather driving gloves and aviators. He understood new ideas more easily than his ossified contemporaries, and his grasp of concepts and the future, his outrage at the retrograde and unfair, grew sharper as he grew older. He had declared trend after trend, yelped and yawped idea after idea. He became one of the gentlest and most beloved mentors in American journalism. And he showed astonishing courage in his illness. I remember visiting him at his and Gail’s Central Park South apartment during a difficult period, and he had to drip a particularly odious medicine into himself. “Don’t worry,” he reassured his guests, “it only looks bad. It doesn’t hurt.”

When I went to see him in Berkeley, nothing was clearer than this: He was beloved, deeply, by his students. There was some awe, more affection in their eyes as they approached him. “Professor Felker?” they would ask, and show him pages. His regard for their magazines was considerate, focused, uncondescending. He was a great listener. Clay was never a sentimental editor; nor was he a sentimental teacher. He was just respectful of all these young men and women, these 21st-century successors.

Clay wrote two pieces for this newspaper. He never seemed quite as certain about himself as a writer as he might have, and I’m sorry, for one, that he didn’t complete the autobiography he started. But his Felkerian ideas were as vivid on the page as they were when he belted them. He wrote this soon after Sept. 11, 2001:

“The people who come to New York will continue to be ambitious, looking for more than just work, looking for advancement and the possibility of realizing their dreams. The city thrives on the young, the marginalized and the outcasts—people who live on the edge, driven by necessity to creativity.

“Once more, New York now faces the dangerous opportunity of creative destruction. For people accustomed to living on the edge, out of the terrible tragedy can come the spark of creativity that will give rise to something new: a new belle époque , such as those in the late 40’s and 50’s, and again in the 90’s. It will take a while. But a new city will grow out of the shell of the old. … The ambitious, striving, swarming culture of this wounded place is what will re-create New York City, once again, as the world’s greatest.”

And he wrote this three months later:

“New York’s historic role has been that of an idea factory, where ingenious and capable people, packed together, take raw materials from around the globe and transform them into products and services they sell back to the rest of the world—at higher prices. Whether it’s managing money, designing fashions, solving knotty legal or marketing problems, or translating ephemeral ideas into art and entertainment, New Yorkers thrive by charging high fees for their advice and services.

“This commercial alchemy—the advice and ideas—depends on a critical mass of ambitious and highly creative people, and New York is home to more of them than probably any other metropolis in the world. It may cause outsiders to feel jealous or inferior. But they’ll seek it out anyway, with all its irritating confidence and street smarts.

“That’s what New York does.”

That’s what Clay Felker did.

pkaplan@observer.com

He seems to have understood the mood of his nation better than anyone since Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola forecast the fate of the American empire in The Godfather.

And he has world leaders mouthing his dialogue, day and night. Here is Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, in The New York Times yesterday: “There are two mentalities in this region,” he said. “Conspiracy and mistrust.”

Baghdada-bing.

The rest of the world was muttering about Tony Soprano’s final blackout, but Mr. Maliki proved once more that David Chase has been battling for something worth fighting for. What do I mean, battled?

Try David Chase himself, as interviewed cathartically and perceptively by the hardest-working man in Sopranos land, Alan Sepinwall, the TV critic for Tony Soprano’s end-of-the-driveway hometown paper, The Star-Ledger: “No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” Mr. Chase said. “We did what we thought we had to do.”

He had completed his story, but he was giving us a gift in the last scene: He was telling us more. What happened in the four last minutes was plenty of information, and not of the conspiracy-theory type: We got to see the world as Tony does, suffused with anxiety and some amusement and apprehension. It took David Chase eight years to get Tony in and out of therapy, and he was improved about as much as a patient can be improved, maybe 2 to 5 percent.

“It felt like ginger ale in my skull,” he told Dr. Melfi in the first episode. The Sopranos ended up as it began—not with a bang, but an anxiety attack.

Only this time it was ours. This time we blacked out.

“I was shocked by the ending,” said Peter Bogdanovich, the movie director and film historian who played Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, Tony’s therapist’s therapist. Mr. Bogdanovich said he had shot another scene that didn’t make the final episode, in which he was comforting an exhausted, bereaved Dr. Melfi.

“It ends at that moment because that’s his life,” said Mr. Bogdanovich. “He’s anxious about getting blown away, the F.B.I. is going to indict him, Syl is going to die, everything is insecure and tense. It kept going, and the insert shots kept making you feel it was the last thing he was going to do. Endings, endings, endings. The little things in life are the last thing you are going to do. In fact, that’s his life.

“He didn’t give you what you expected—instead of a Hollywood ending,” Mr. Bogdanovich said, and so the viewer was left with “any number of imaginings, so you ask, ‘What the fuck happened?’”

“David has been consistent by doing everything with a vengeance he was not allowed to do on network television, so he gave you a very ambiguous ending,” he continued. “Which is not what the American audience is used to.”

The entire business history of American television has been a conspiracy toward two ends:

a) the resolved ending, generally happy;

b) destroying ambiguity.

Life and art weren’t supposed to jibe when it came to commercial entertainment. It’s not that David Chase was the first guy to come up with ambiguity and moral relativism on TV, but he may have done it with the most vengeance of any television writer since Rod Serling.

You may have noticed that the guys in the safe house where Tony was hiding were watching an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s a 1963 episode called “The Bard,” and it was written by Rod Serling, the patron saint of television auteurs. In it, a failed playwright summons William Shakespeare from the dead to write his TV pilot for him. Shakespeare, needless to say, sells it, then is compromised and crushed. On Mr. Chase’s soundtrack, you could hear the agent lecture the writer: “The television industry today … is preoccupied with talent, looking for quality … the television writer is a major commodity.” Television writer … commodity. It is the voice of the network slaughterer.

Now the tabloid writers are mad at him. They wanted the show to splatter. As John Candy and Joe Flaherty used to say on SCTV, they wanted it to blow up real good. Mr. Chase inspired the ire of yahoo nation by bagging and dumping what he wanted to avoid: The dark bedtime-story end of The Sopranos was in great demand, and he provided it—splattt!—under the wheels of the Phil Leotardo’s Ford Expedition.

But he also provided the first really grown-up summation in the history of American television: The subjective shot of Tony experiencing the American influx of diners at Holsten’s restaurant was news, as was his inglorious humanity. The final shot of Tony before the black, if freeze-framed, is a human image more photojournalistic than dramatic. If you have that particular device, take a look at Tony, the woolly mammoth in freeze-frame before the ice age, another human in anxious abatement in the Age of Ambiguity.

“It is the most subversive television series ever because it makes you like the monster,” said Mr. Bogdanovich, who was still mulling the last scene. “You don’t know what you’re waiting for. It’s the perfect use of suspense. You are trapped, not wanting anything to happen, but wanting something to happen. It’s very vicious. You’re left with any number of imaginings. What the fuck happened? Which shows you’re bloodthirsty also.”

We saw the two things that were preoccupying Tony: the one unambivalent relationship of his life, the adoring Meadow, his only true believer—she decided to become a lawyer when she saw her daddy taken away in cuffs!—and the assassins around him.

The Chase Gang gave us all the information we needed in the hour: indictments, threats, business, A.J., Carmela, Janice, it was all wrapped up. I was always certain that someone was going to clue Carmela in on the murder of Ade, but it didn’t happen. When Carmela entered Holsten’s, she entered in long shot, and her friendly, reassuring smile to Tony was casual and loving, but quick. A.J. entered with what looked like a potential assassin, his effective twin. But it was Meadow who received the Hitchcockian treatment of threat: Would she be able to park? Was she about to be locked in by assassins? Would she make it across Broad Street, on which she seemed to be in as much jeopardy as was Janet Leigh in Psycho?

“Anybody who wants to watch it,” Mr. Chase told Mr. Sepinwall in The Star-Ledger, “it’s all there.”

The Sopranos could have made it in the Clinton years, but it could only have become the deeply troubling comedy it was in the Bush era. Not because of the White House so much, but because of the viewer’s complicity in the dirty brew of power that flowed from this White House. Not because of the war, but because of the public sense of responsibility for this war.

“Oh,” says Carmela when she’s trying to talk A.J. out of joining the army, “you want to get your legs blown off?”

“Always with the dramatics,” he says.

But not really.

Earlier, at Bobby Bacala’s funeral, A.J., who truly did seem to relax and inhabit his own body once more after his yellow S.U.V. exploded, had a peroration for the commercial landscape the show inhabited: “America,” he said, “is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling and come-ons for shit they don’t need and can’t afford?” Paulie mocked him and descended into a Norm Crosby routine.

But David Chase fought for and won a strange moment of pure insight into the American process. It was romantic, bleary, filthy, piercing. It was as much a comedy of American sobering up after 9/11 as Dallas was a comedy of America getting drunk on the Reagan years. But Mr. Chase fought a battle and won: He created a last shot on television that was one of the best close-ups in movie history, the snapshot of Tony taking in American ambiguity: the Boy Scouts, the killers, the gangstas and the one person toward whom he had little ambiguity. Like the final image of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, he captured all the intimate uncertainty of his age, in a room that could have been heaven or hell, but with good onion rings.

It was, so far, the best last episode in TV history—better than The Mary Tyler Moore Show or All in the Family or Seinfeld, despite all the screaming about it from plotmongers who wouldn’t have been happy with anything short of the conflagration from the end of Scarface or Tony whacking Dr. Elliot Kupferberg before he entered witness protection. Paradox, moral relativism, internality. All the stuff that network television has battled and ejected in the past 60 years—except in a very few instances—is the essence that David Chase brought to his 86 hours. David Chase’s enduring triumph in American television is that he embraced ambiguity and looked for poetry in the Bush administration.

Paulie Walnuts thought he had seen the Virgin Mary, and Tony mocked him; but in fact, Tony had seen the other side of mortality as well, and almost was cajoled by Cousin Tony—a spectral Steve Buscemi—into entering that big, well-lit house in his coma dream, after Junior shot him. But he didn’t, he re-entered the living and went on. That was, he knew somewhere, his task, and it’s why the cozy, dark ordinariness of Holsten’s restaurant in Bloomfield, N.J., was a terrifying but immensely moving way station.

Orson Welles once said that “Every story essentially has an unhappy ending. If you want a happy ending it all depends on where you stop telling it.” David Chase’s triumph was that he had the balls to stop telling it right h

We worked in a home. Four floors, a giant alimentary center-hall staircase, caked moldings, brass chandeliers, glass-fronted oak cupboards, The New York Observer sometimes felt like a Henry James society home or a 70's swinger pad, with reporters stacked and stuffed in its confines like Hong Kong tailors. Our legal reporter set up his computer in the fourth-floor closet, near the tuxedo that was used by whomever had to go out to a formal evening.

When I walked in, Mr. Charles Bagli and Mr. Terry Golway were stuffed back-to-back in the front living room, reporters were so close that one yammering diva could stop work for the entire room, turning the whole floor into an instant Eugene O'Neill parlor trauma. Later, a strange and occasionally brilliant agglomeration of writers and editors built up; pretty often, some were seduced to go off to slicker, better-paid indenturements. We lived together like vaudevillians at an actors' boarding house.

At this very moment, there are around 20 former Observer employees at work at The New York Times , inmates at The Wall Street Journal , countless refugees in the Condé Nast Building, but does one of them relieve him or herself in a singing office toilet that gurgles 23 hours a day? For ambition's sake, they cashed in their chance to shower midday in a claw-footed bathtub, or to spy with a vengeance at courtyard transgressions like Rear Window 's L.B. Jeffries: One night, one editor called the cops when he saw a new mother leave her baby on the fire escape. Another editor was almost tempted to sin with a writer when an ancient brass door fixture snapped, trapping them inside.

Visitors invariably had the same reaction on entering the house: It's so cute! And it was. But the response of editors and writers, who trundled through, tromping on worn carpet, cursing the vents, wondering if the auditory carrying capabilities of the air-conditioning vents would carry conversations to other departments, was baleful. Phone books and files were occasionally hurled from the fourth-floor window out onto the 64th Street sidewalk like a faithless lover's pajamas.

Visitors stopped by. The writer Veronica Geng lived down the street and used to offer advice, bartering it for a day with one editor who drove upstate to empty her country house. Down the block, the great luxury mastodon 32 East 64th, home to Mrs. Kitty Carlisle Hart, whose trim gams took her on their evening constitutional past the office every night; she would nod and ask, "How's the paper?" Across the street, the vaguely decadent Plaza Athénée, with its leopard-skin benches and $12 martinis.

Movie shoots were common: Al Pacino shouting spittle into the afternoon air, Keanu Reeves grinning at our young reporters. The pavement on 64th Street was wide and clean, a province of billionaires strutting down the street-Ron Perelman and David Geffen. Chanel suits, Giorgio Armani and La Perla, the ritzy underwear store. Next-door to the newspaper itself, and down some steps, a ritzy veterinarian, where endless pet crates were carried, and slinky septuagenarian Lauren Bacall looking left, looking right, heading down.

While up into our building trooped writers: the cheeky, the depressed, the jolly, the mission-driven, the perky. On the first floor, in what had been a grand dining room, the production department: hot waxers reminiscent of-not reminiscent of, identical to!-your high-school paper's.

One flight up, the mandarin office of the publisher, a huge Oriental frieze staring down at the participants below, black-and-white photographs of Thomas Mann and Einstein smiling down at the whole enterprise. Across the hall, ad salespeople: glamorous, dark and shiny ladies with a sheen, first single, then married, then single, with dangerous ebony hairdos like movie noir heroines.

Cranking up and down, a cage elevator, witness to God knows how many muttered or screaming conversations, creaking up and down among the four floors and the cool basement, where checks were cut that soothed tempers on the other floors.

Highest of all in this crazy little enterprise, the dotty fireworks of the fourth floor, where politics were dissected, plots hatched, sociology sprinkled, coffee guzzled and names thrown around: Mario, Harvey, Rudy, Jerry, Puff, Woody, Punch, Si, Liz, Rupert. Hidden calls from psychiatrists, occasional nervous breakdowns not-so- manqué , pranks of Homeric intricacy, involving a floating cast of characters that appeared to the in-house residents of the house like the offstage stock company in a sitcom during the Seinfeldian 90's. Story subjects called and screamed; others showed up for some mischief: Bill Murray, Mike Wallace, the occasional Mayor. Norman Mailer, clanking in on a cane to bring draft after draft of his cartoon "Puffs." Bill O'Reilly and Carol Channing were on the phone. Martinis were served in summer, and "Sex and the City" came and went. And then the giddiness came to a freeze-frame on Sept. 11, 2001. The smoke from the south of Manhattan hung acrid above 64th Street as editors slumped on their desks.

There was Leon the office-supplies guy, who gave out pencils one at a time, and Angie the switchboard operator, who shrieked the editors' names up the stairwell like Stanley Kowalski, and the young intern who everyone was afraid might have explosives strapped under his shirt. But nobody brought out the curious empathy of the building like the librarian who sat in her cubby making small cooing noises like a pigeon and one day just fluttered away without notice, leaving behind the French-fairy-tale possibility that she had been a bird all along.

Now we're moving downtown, to a classy old skyscraper two blocks south of the Flatiron Building, in the neighborhood of the Gramercy Tavern and Eisenberg's, but not the magnificent coffee shops Gardenia and the Viand, where big Pete and smooth George respectively presided. The girls will be younger downtown and not as well dressed, but not as dressed. The billionaires will still be there, but their drivers will be waiting to take them back uptown.

Around the corner and up the street from us was a tall, distinctive luxury building with a Citibank, its first floor faced in blue bricks, an anomaly of bad taste in our chi-chi neighborhood. Its brazen cluelessness made it stand out like a structure in Munchkin Land, the sector of L. Frank Baum's Oz that was all blue among the high-rises of the Emerald City. They could never fill the joint up, and the Europeans eating lunch at La Goulue used to stare up at its strange refusal to be tasteful as though it was the public-school girl in polyester at the Cotillion. Now the owners, finally wised-up, have caved, and they're refacing it in mud-brown brick, another Madison Avenue makeover.

Goodbye, blue-brick poseur, goodbye, red-brick townhouse; we're heading south, toward Broadway. There are fresh, grotesque and homely anomalies downtown.

Not so fast.

In the past 30 years, since he has taken control of his own career, Warren Beatty has made at least one big, significant movie in each decade. He officially opened the 60's for a new generation of filmmakers when he produced Bonnie and Clyde . He put both the frenzied loneliness of that decade and the dissolution of the 70's in focus with his, Robert Towne's and Hal Ashby's L.A. Restoration farce, Shampoo . He then attempted, as Reaganism raged, and with spurts of success, to tame and explain homegrown radicalism with Reds . There were other movies and hits, Heaven Can Wait and Dick Tracy and Bugsy , and a flop that caused nationwide coughing a few years ago, Love Affair .

Now he has directed and co-written a movie for 20th Century Fox called Bulworth . It is the best political comedy of its generation, and one of the best ever made by a Hollywood studio, the late, sweet-and-sour fruit of a manic group that was, just a moment ago, the mad rebel youth culture. It's as good-willed, brave, idealistic, very funny, as complicated as the best movies of the 70's. Most of all, it has a startling optimism about race and America, positing as no studio product has in years that Americans descended from Africans and Americans descended from other places still have a chance to be merged into one country.

It's a truth-teller's movie, and whereas President Bill Clinton knew that somehow Primary Colors would make him look sympathetic, he's lately been heard grumbling on the golf course that Bulworth won't. For Bulworth breaks from the system; it knows that American politics are mired in the gumbo of big money; it says that–as Gov. Fob James' open mike showed the other day in Alabama–that politicians know they're immobilized, that they're selling sugar pills; that senators are trapped. Bulworth is ideological, it's true, but it's also subjective reporting, culled from Warren Beatty's 30 years of political glamour-shlepping, from his time with Bobby Kennedy in 1968, to his campaigning for George McGovern in 1972, to his near-kingmaking and immolation with his doppelgänger Gary Hart in 1984 and 1988. He picked up a lot of information the past 30 years, and Bulworth –as opposed to Primary Colors , which placarded it–oozes it, like toxins from the pores.

It is about J. Billington Bulworth, a Democratic senator on the verge of a nervous breakdown, who hires a hitman to end his stagnated life over the course of a weekend, and–once the tethers are snapped–goes on a truth-telling jag, falls in love with a beautiful girl from South Central Los Angeles and begins, inconceivably, rapping rapping rapping the truth about American politics to anyone who will listen. It's a through-the-looking-glass kind of comedy, only what he finds down there is the landscape of American politics. It's also the leftiest movie that's been made after almost 20 years of Reagan aftershock, and the glib gamblers are asking if Rupert Murdoch–the movies' most forthrightly conservative mogul–will support, market and promote this strange member of his 20th Century Fox harem, an anomaly in a summer of movies about crashing asteroids and Godzilla, whose foot is as big as the Merritt Parkway.

Warren Beatty in New York is always a slightly incongruous sight. He worked here as a young man in the late 50's, living on West 99th Street, then West 68th Street, studying with Stella Adler and appearing on stage. But he's mostly identified with his Batcave of the 60's, the penthouse of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. In 1969, he said, he had dinner with Lillian Hellman at the Carlyle, and she chastised him for staying at a "fleabag" hotel in New York and told him to check in. With a few exceptions, he's been coming back since, to stay in a suite equipped with a grand piano, probably a little nicer than the ones he used to play when he was playing cocktail piano at bars in the late 50's.

He made Bulworth , he said, for emotional reasons. "I've been through too many political campaigns and experiences," said Warren Beatty, "and been close to too many people who were assassinated either by bullet or by scandal or by paparazzi. I've been through too many campaigns and too many assassinations. Or assassination by marginalization. By rumor, by confusion, by obfuscation. Or for that matter assassination through 30 second spots. Negative campaigning. To not have strong feelings about it. Because my friends who have largely been marginalized. Bobby Kennedy was shot to death. But the other people who were assassinated. Gary Hart was assassinated in other ways. Jerry Brown is assassinated in other ways. Jesse Jackson is marginalized in another way. Nader … So these voices are quieted."

In itself, Bulworth is part of a descendency from other places: It is a grandchild of Frank Capra's big social comedies, with an innocent truth-teller rising on the shoulders of the people; it is a nephew of the old screwball comedies, where a man who was sure of his identity loses it and emerges as quite something else together. It is a brother of the blaxploitation movies of 20 and 30 years ago, but with an amazing hip-hop score–sure to convert the middle-aged to gangsta rap–that combines with a symphonic Ennio Morricone backdrop.

It also takes on policy. Some of the ideas in Bulworth are 90's-populist–Mr. Beatty's fascination with the 30-second spot. Some are throwbacks to the 60's: He talks about the inner cities with a passion that has been missing since Bobby Kennedy's 1968 campaign. Some are Clintonian, or perhaps Rodhamian: He assaults the health insurance financial structure with a vicious, tragic directness. And some are cockeyed, just this side of visionary: J. Billington Bulworth asserts that the salvation of the country is for everybody to screw themselves into one big interracial gene pool, an "open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction."

"Well," he said at the Carlyle, "I think that race will eventually disappear in America, because over the long haul it will disappear because people are attracted to one another, and they will become the same color, and that's happened in other countries."

Bulworth is direct about race in a way that movies have not been for some time. When Eldridge Cleaver died recently, the papers were filled with the sadness of his gnarled life, with his wild return to America and his crazy crawling to the Republican Party. But Bulworth has a memory about black America, that the 60's were not a wasted time. When 26-year-old woman whom Bulworth falls for, played by Halle Berry, begins spouting her own doctrine in the movie, she explains that her mother knew Huey Newton, who was socially active in the 'hood.

"Huey was tightly wound," said Warren Beatty. "If you said 'Hi, Huey!' it would be like that table." He knocked on the table. "He was like that all the time. He had a good sense of humor. I remember being at a party with him one night, and he says, 'Nixon's going to be gone.' And I said, 'I don't think so, Huey.' And he said, 'Nixon's going to be gone.'" Mr. Beatty laughed. "And I said–oh, I tell this story in the movie–oh, no, I cut it out of the movie. I told this story, and I cut it out of the movie. 'So you want to make a bet?' And I said, 'Yeah.' He says, 'How much?' And I said, 'I'll bet you …' I think we bet $100. And we put it in a lamp that was hanging from the ceiling, and finally Nixon was gone. I went back there five years later, and I got a stepladder and I went up to the lamp. It was still there." He laughed, then stopped. "Huey was dead," he said.

When Bulworth begins his clunky, endearing rapping, there is a sense of restored idealism, and the movie will be assaulted for innocence, nuttiness, gasbagging. But it has ideas. "C'mon, c'mon," Senator Bulworth says to three network newsmen moderating his debate with an identical, younger version of himself, "we got three pretty rich guys here, getting paid by some really rich guys, to ask a couple of other rich guys questions about their campaigns? But our campaigns are financed by the same guys that pay you guys your money."

And, rapping, with his ski cap on, Bulworth says:

"They know the rich is gettin' richer, an richer, an richer

While the middle class is gettin' more more.

Jus' makin' billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of bucks?

Well, my friend, if you weren't already rich at the start,

That situation sucks!

'Cause the richest mutha****er in five of us

Is gettin' ninety-****in' eight percent of it."

You may think it's just the return of the radical chic, but it's such an ambitious movie that it's a kind of dredging up of a part of history that was lost. And finally, it is, for Mr. Beatty, as he said as George Roundy the not-so-bright, randy hairdresser in Shampoo , the "epitome of my life!" Warren Beatty has had a distinguished weird career, with relatively few movies and a high ratio of hits. For the man about whom Carly Simon is said to have written "You're So Vain," Bulworth is an astonishingly unvain movie. It opens with a catatonic, unshaven Mr. Beatty, who is soon collapsed into convulsive sobbing.

It is also the result of, weirdly, what Mr. Beatty does best: producing. For Warren Beatty, producing has been a salvation. When he made Reds , he brought his romance of socialism to the White House and showed it to Ronald Reagan, who was fascinated by it. Ronald Reagan, after all, had been a contract player in Hollywood 20 years before the onslaught of the hybrid producer-director-writer-star, and–as Mr. Beatty had been briefly–a slave to Jack Warner. "I think Reagan always had kind of a personal reaction to me," said Mr. Beatty. "I think he kind of liked me. And for that matter, I liked him. I think, you know, he didn't produce and write and act and direct at the same time. So when I showed him the movie, he was interested in how I could be doing all those jobs. And I don't think he took the socialistic nature of the characters seriously."

But it's 1998 and Warren Beatty is 61. So, the other night, the paparazzi captured a strange sight at Moomba, the Seventh Avenue South bar where there was a party for film director James Toback: It was Warren Beatty and Leonardo DiCaprio crammed together. And Mr. Beatty gave Mr. DiCaprio this advice: Be more than just an actor. And make hay. "I don't know Leonardo very well," said Mr. Beatty. "But when I did have a conversation with him, I liked him very much. I suggested to him that it would probably be better for him if he went ahead and accepted the fact that he should make his own movie now. Which would be maybe contrary to the advice he might receive from a lot of other people. Because I think movie acting is difficult for a young, good-looking guy. Because he's put into a position of a certain unnatural passivity in relation to the overall. And it stirs up a lot of sort of fruitless patricide."

Fruitless patricide! Warren Beatty, who began his life in the movies as a male beauty, has finally become, if not a father-figure in American life, at least a father. He is, as you know if you read the magazines, the husband of attractive film star Annette Bening and the father of Kathryn, Ben and Isabel Beatty. But he is still the man of whom Brigitte Bardot wrote, "Warren had a ferocious charm that was impossible to resist. Why or for whom would I have resisted him?"

After all, he's Warren Beatty. And he's still cagey. I asked him if he thinks "less about sex than he used to." First he laughed. "Do I think less about sex?"

Observer : Yeah. Do you think about it less than you used to? You know? I'm not going to ask anything ruder than that. But do you think about it less?

WB: I don't even find that rude.

Observer : O.K.

WB (grabbing the cocktail nuts) : Could I have some of those? Because I really want to think about this. (Laughs) Do I think less about it?

He looks away.

WB: In my great Aunt Birdie and Aunt Maggie's family in Virginia, there was a lady who had a nervous breakdown. And when she had this breakdown, she could only speak with the words of Oscar Hammerstein, Dorothy Fields, Larry Hart, Cole Porter. So when you talk to her–and I was 5 years old–I would say, Mrs. Liebowitz, what do you think about such and such? Because everyone assumed that she should be treated very delicately. And Liebowitz was not a common name in Richmond, Virginia. And she would say to me "You are the promised kiss of springtime …" And it went on like that for a long time, and she didn't sleep. Finally, they put her to sleep. And she woke up and she was fine."

This is a lovely story and appears exactly as he says it in Bulworth . What it had to do with the question, no one had any idea.

WB: Do I think less about sex? (Pauses.) Well, the question is, did I ever think a lot about it?

Observer : Well, did you?

WB: I think I probably should have done more thinking about it. I don't think I think less about it. Excuse me. I don't think less often about it.

Observer : Wow, you don't?

WB: No … I probably do more thinking now … And since you're faced with it every time you turn around … I mean, the question you probably are asking is, what's it like to go from that to that?

Observer : Yeah. Well, O.K. I'll take that. Anyway, what is it like to go from that to that?

WB: To go from that to that?

Observer : Yeah.

WB: I don't want to sound to Jungian here.

Observer : That's all right.

WB: And I don't want to sound less testosteronic than I would want you to think of me … (laughs) … but children do replace that type of behavior. In a much more rewarding way. You know, children and … it's a lot of the same stuff. You know what I mean? It's a lot of the same stuff …"

Warren had a ferocious charm that was impossible to resist. Why or for oom would I have reseested eem?

In fact, Bulworth is, in part, a frenzied recollection of Mr. Beatty's career, of Shampoo and The Parallax View and Mickey One and Bonnie and Clyde . "If he just hadn't chased so many women," his aide Murphy, played by Oliver Platt, suggests, he might have been President. The same doesn't quite go for Mr. Beatty–he never got to be President. Harrison Ford (same initials as President Henry Fonda!) has gotten to be President. Although there was a time when he thought about it. "I never came close to it," he said. "There were a few days a long time ago when a person just capriciously threw my name into the, and this is a long time ago, into the California pool with big California politicians … the lieutenant governor, the mayor of San Francisco, the mayor of Los Angeles, and various other people. And this was when I was pretty young. And my figure on me came up higher than other people. And it was a political pollster. So there were two or three days in which I felt … inflated. And important. And I thought yeah, sure. And I never thought about it again."

He did, however, get in close with Gary Hart, and his irritation with the preoccupation with President Clinton's sex crisis leaves him irritated, probably with flashes of the good ship Monkey Business before him. He calls the Lewinsky business "not important." "It's very easy to see if a person's different from you, black or white," he said, "or if someone cheats on this wife, that's easier to draw an assessment of a person's character, and stay off what should be the real issues."

But he blames the decline of quality in American politics on "money" and on the 30-second ad. "There's no way for someone to compete against somebody who has millions and millions and millions of dollars' worth of negative 30-second spots going against them," he said. "I'll tell you why I think it's worse now. With the proliferation of channels, you know, all these cable stations, it costs more money to cover it all. With three networks that was a different matter. But the sophisticated means of finding out what the people think in their rearview mirror are now so efficient that one can check it out, spend some money and check out and then pump the advertising in."

So far, pretty standard, but then he said: "It's money. Money and technology. It should increase democratization. But the technology is not controlled democratically. Technology's owned by wealthy interests, and so advertising serves the advertiser. And this goes across the board in all areas, in fast food, or politics, or movies, or newspapers." The last part of which brought up the following question: Would Rupert Murdoch support his movie, the most directly liberal movie in years, a movie that curries applause from an audience when some baby street-gang members packing heat get to tell the L.A.P.D. to go screw themselves? "Well, I think there's really only one question," Mr. Beatty said. "Will they spend the money you have to spend on movies? And the answer to that is … I don't know. I hope so."

But Fox seems confused by the movie: It bought no advertisement in The New York Times the week before it was to open in New York, and practically all the heavy lifting has been done by Mr. Beatty and Peggy Siegal, a New York publicist. "I can only say I don't know," said Mr. Beatty about Fox's marketing support for Bulworth . "They say to me that they will support the picture. They've been honest with me up until now." He didn't know if Rupert Murdoch had seen the picture, and when he was asked if he thought Bulworth would stick in Mr. Murdoch's craw, he said, "Maybe it sticks in his craw. I don't know. I really don't know." The movie opens with exclusive screenings in New York and Los Angeles on May 15, and on 2,000 screens nationwide on May 20, two days after Godzilla , and it's got its work cut out for it.

When Bulworth breaks sobbing down in the beginning, it's a meditation on late middle age and the hollowness of the hollow life. And a little incongruously, Mr. Beatty seems to understand the despair. Somehow, Bulworth constitutes a summing-up not only of Mr. Beatty's long career as an American movie star, but of 30 years of wandering in and out of the shadow of the 60's. He has seen something in his 61 years, and he has ideas: Some are inspired, some are naïve and some are sensible. But whatever else is true, there's a Capra-like drive to both the movie and the director's purpose. "It's a volcano," said one person close to the movie who recently was watching somewhat worriedly, trying to see if the studio would get behind the picture.

In itself, Bulworth represents a kind of closure for the tragic generation that collapsed under its own faux-revolutionary weight, a kind of comedy elegy to Huey Newton, to Democrats elected in the 1974 post-Watergate midterm elections, to the rise of television, to the collapse of racial optimism in America.

"What we didn't know in the 70's," said Mr. Beatty, "was you do this, you kill him at the end, flop. But what you're really talking about is, after all is said and done, the advertising campaigns and the grosses go up in smoke, and you're only left with the movie. And they call it the Golden Age, which went from sort of Bonnie and Clyde , over there, to that other thing that happened–for me, it's Reds . The old studios kind of got tuckered out about then. And then all these rebellious movies started being made.

"That content was then chosen pretty much by these lunatics in the asylum that went from non-money people up until a new boss took over. That new boss was television advertising. And so went from the old money people, to the new money people. It went from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to the ad guys, and advertising has been fooling people ever since. It's gone from 600 theaters to 1,000 and from 1,000 to 2,000. Dick Tracy opened in 3,000 theaters. Godzilla is opening in 6,000 theaters. And it's a nuclear attack.

"And the same way as in politics. Get a picture of the people who were in the Senate in 1968. Get a picture of them. Take their names off the picture, and then tell me if you would consider Ernest Gruening or Paul Douglas or Stuart Symington, Mike Mansfield, Jack Javits … Tell me if you would be inclined to run a lot of 30-second spots with them … and these were great men. I could go on and on and on about them." The phone rang. It was Peggy Siegal, the New York publicist. There was an overflow at the Ziegfeld, and she had to schedule a second screening at the Coronet.

Warren Beatty looked up in the Bemelmans Bar and popped a nut. It was 1998 and he was grinning, big and creased. The 70's weren't back. But they weren't necessarily over, either.