Victor Newman, Villain of the Afternoon, 28 Years Later

[Queen]

Villain of the Afternoon, 28 Years Later - NYTIMES

OF all the world’s spectacularly affluent tycoons, none have inspired a sense of ambivalence that runs quite as deep and powerful as Victor Newman, a Forbes 400 buccaneer whose very name merges winning and rebirth.

Newman runs his multinational conglomerate with the mercilessness of a funhouse mirror and sheds his redundant wives as easily as he does his bespoke tuxedo. He’ll buy a company just to fire his nemesis — say, the chief executive. Or just to fire a nuisance — say, one of his numerous offspring. There’s no room for passengers on Newman’s gravy train.

“Victor Newman is the most decisive, self-assured businessman the world has ever known,” said Maria Arena Bell, head writer for the CBS soap opera “The Young and the Restless,” on which for almost three decades this Machiavellian monster has schemed and scammed his way to the top of the corporate heap.

Since the character’s debut in 1980 Eric Braeden has played Victor Newman with lip-smacking brio. And audiences have thrilled to their hero’s board-room power plays and bedroom reconciliations. The top-rated daytime serial for the last 19 years, “Y&R” today draws about five million viewers an episode, many of them women in the 30s, 40s and 50s.

“They love the power of the man,” said Mr. Braeden, still trim and fit at 67. His accent, rich with the sounds of his native Germany, is thick with naked menace. “Despite all his flaws, Victor Newman is omniscient and invincible.”

At a time when the empires of some real-life industrialists are shrinking, if not disappearing altogether, the authority of this dirty, rotten TV scoundrel remains unchallenged and his capital limitless.

“Victor Newman should never lose his power or his money,” Mr. Braeden said with heavy finality. “Without them there’s no conflict, and ultimately conflict makes him flourish.”

With their gloomy denouements, soaps have been called the people’s “Iliad.” The Troy of “Y&R” is Genoa City, Wis., where, at least on the show, every encounter is freighted with a knowledge of past infidelities, rivalries and betrayals. In the middle of the melodramatic maelstrom of “Y&R” is Victor Newman, who has withstood amnesia, a heart attack, spells of temporal-lobe epilepsy, a harpoon to the genital area, a carjacking, a tell-all biography (“Ruthless!”), a conviction for bribery, an enforced stay in a psychiatric ward, nine weddings (three to the same ex-stripper), six divorces, two vasectomies and the theft of his semen from a sperm bank by two women, only one of whom managed to impregnate herself with the plunder. He’s now in prison, framed for killing a mobster.

“Victor Newman has led a full life,” Mr. Braeden said, deadpan. It’s also been, at (many) times, a vindictive one. Left for dead by his nemesis Jack Abbott after being felled by a heart attack in his office, he engineered a hostile takeover to swallow up the cosmetics firm owned by Abbott’s father. And consumed by jealousy over his first wife’s unfaithfulness, Newman sealed her lover in a basement dungeon and fed him baked rats.

“Victor Newman follows his own path,” Mr. Braeden said with glee. “He never takes a back seat, and he exacts his revenge. Viewers instinctively like that.” Yet for all his guile, Mr. Braeden said, Newman is a “highly moral man,” by which he means Newman believes in ancient verities: courage, perseverance, honor. The character’s treachery is belied by his Old World charm, which he uses like a Guarnerius to seduce or like a weapon to destroy.

“When Victor Newman is romantic, collective sighs can be heard in living rooms coast to coast,” said the blogger Toni Pimentel, who added that her “Y&R” spoiler Web site (young-restless.com) averages two million hits a month.

“He rewards loyalty most generously,” she said, “but when he’s in full ruthless mode, it kind of makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. You feel relieved when a commercial breaks in to remind you that he’s a fictional character.”

Mr. Braeden elaborated. “I don’t think there’s an altruistic bone in Victor Newman’s body,” he said. “He’s essentially Darwinian. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is his credo. He grew up in an orphanage, fighting for his place in the sun. I understand where he’s coming from.”

Mr. Braeden was born into harsh circumstances in Nazi Germany. Named Hans Gudegast, he was one of four sons of the mayor of Bredenbek, a hamlet near the port city of Kiel. At the end of World War II his father, a onetime Nazi Party member, was imprisoned by the British for a year. “He died when I was 12,” Mr. Braeden said. “To support my brothers and me, my mother got a job so menial that we never discussed it.”

At 18 Mr. Newman first visited New York and soon encountered his first captain of industry. His girlfriend, Rosely, was the oldest daughter of Rudolf August Oetker, an entrepreneur who became a billionaire running his private food company, Oetker-Gruppe. Mr. Oetker took the young Mr. Braeden to lunch at the St. Regis hotel in New York City. “I remember passionately arguing the case for the Cuban revolution with this archcapitalist,” Mr. Braeden recalled. A second lunch invitation was never extended.

The teenager drifted from New York to Texas to Montana to California, where he enrolled at what was then called Santa Monica City College. Informed that Hollywood was looking for Germans, he turned actor. Cameos in a platoon of 1960s TV war sagas (“The Gallant Men.” “Combat!,” “12 O’Clock High”) led to a featured role as Hauptmann Dietrich of Rommel’s Africa Corps in “The Rat Patrol.”

Mr. Braeden, then still known as Hans Gudegast, was typed as a Nazi. “The experience was utterly dehumanizing,” he said. “I was cast as unctuous, one-dimensional villains. I wanted a chance to play a complex human being”

That chance arrived only after he reinvented himself as Eric Braeden, adapting the last name from his hometown. At 39 he signed on with “Y&R” for what was supposed to be a three-month run. Twenty-eight years later it’s unclear where Mr. Braeden ends and Victor Newman begins.

Mess with Victor Newman, “and he comes back at you twice as hard,” Mr. Braeden said. “That’s his M.O., and that’s my M.O. While we’re both capable of tremendous tenderness, neither of us take” guff from anyone.

In 1999, when Mr. Braeden announced his intention to produce a Reconstruction-era western about striking plantation workers, movie moguls laughed. They laughed louder when he announced he would star as a kindly Confederate colonel whose wife and son are murdered while he watches in helpless horror (from a cage, no less). Though “The Man Who Came Back” went straight to Netflix, it nonetheless got made and, in February, had a Hollywood premiere.

That ability to hang tough is the executive trait that Mr. Braeden admires most in his alter ego, no matter how many barbarians try to crash his gates. The deepening global recession is just another test, one Newman will likely pass with ease. “He never operates out of fear,” Ms. Bell said. “He’s a risk taker and will look for ways to make this work for him.”

Mr. Braeden even has a simple solution to the current economic woes: Ask Victor Newman to lend the world the money.

[ian]

Oh, if only everyone thought as highly of Eric Braeden as he thinks of himself.

[Toups]

[Eric Braeden]God bless, Eric Braeden[/Eric Braeden]

[ian]

LMAO! Lesli (Kay, on her board) said that when she saw that on the Emmys (watching it on TV as she was pretty prego at the time) she laughed so hard she practically fell off the couch!

[DeeeDee]

:lol:

[lmfan]

Sure this is a major stroke to Eric Braedan's ego, but the publicity can't hurt for the show.

[All My Shadows]

Interesting that there's a thread about EB's egregious ego. There's this big murder trial going on in my neck of the woods (south Louisiana) where this radio host is accused of murdering his wife. The murderer was said to have been in wearing a fake mustache, and of course, the radio host had bought a fake mustache. When asked why he bought it, he said that he wanted to look handsome, "you know, like Victor Newman on Young and the Restless."

The news people (and me!) *loved* it.

[Faulkner]

I love him.

[marceline]

My father always thought Victor Newman was the bomb and he wasn't the only one. I still remember nights where my dad would be having a beer with friends and they would be talking about Victor's latest exploits. My mom used to update him during dinner. And when my dad took his vacation time at the end of the year, he liked nothing better that watching Y&R.

[boldfan01]

This portrays the paradox of the character of Victor perfectly. The title calls him a villain and Braeden even notes that Victor never really acts out of altruism, but at the same time, he's admired both as a romantic lead and as a take charge kind of guy. The latter quality is why a lot of athletes - I remember interviews with football players about this, plus wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura noted this as well - think of Vic as "The Man," even though his character is built on using a bottomless checkbook to take down anyone and anything in his path.

This also reminds me of a lot of interviews Braeden gave at the time of the bribery story 4-5 years ago. The man really does defend anything Victor does, like the way his rationalization that "greasing the wheels" goes on in business all the time failed to acknowledge that it's still illegal when done the way Victor did it in the story. I guess it helps him play that kind of character to be able to get completely into that mindset.

[YRBB]

I think the article does a good job highlighting different things, like the complexity of Victor's character, and Braeden's ego However, I can't help but be glad that THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS is simultaneously getting some good publicity, something increasingly rare (if not nonexistent) for soaps today.

[DaytimeFan]

Mainstream press coverage is always a wonderful thing. Free positive publicity is ALWAYS great for a show.

I love how the writer specifically noted that the line between Eric Braeden and Victor Newman is pretty much nonexistent.

[Ann_SS]

I have never liked Victor, but every aunt and older woman I know who watches Y&R lurve Victor Newman. I remember an old article on professional football players who watch soaps and they thought that Victor was the man. They also loved Erica Kane.

[kalbir]

Count me in as another Eric Braeden and Victor Newman fan

Quick question for those who watched Y&R pre-Victor: Was Victor introduced on Y&R's first 1 hour episode (February 4, 1980) or was Victor's first appearance later that month?

[Eric200]

This just shows that Victor is the number 1 male in daytime. Could you think of the Times doing a profile of Sonny?