Entertainment

S#*t Ed Asner says

Ed Asner doesn’t mince words: “I’m waiting for an affair,” he growls.

“Got any leads?”

“I’m asking you, you idiot!”

Why, Mr. Grant — you’re hitting on me!

Sitting down to a meal with the man who played crusty editor Lou Grant, Mary Richards’ boss in the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and the titular character in the spin-off TV drama, is a flashback to an era when men behaved badly and reveled in it. Now 82, his bushy eyebrows gone white — though they still precede him into the room — Asner’s back on Broadway in “Grace,” starring Paul Rudd and Michael Shannon.

The show opens Thursday, but the fireworks started weeks before at a press conference, when someone asked Asner why he signed on.

“I always want to work with young people,” he deadpanned. “I didn’t know they’d be retarded young people.” And then, as Shannon struggled to reply, Asner waggled a thumb at him and said, “See?”

Hoo-boy.

“Believe me, I got some hate letters on that,” he said the other night over dinner at Joe Allen. “My son, who’s the regional director of Autism Speaks in Southern California, chewed my ass. I told him, ‘Well, I’m this age, and I have not adapted to the new rules and regs of society …’”

Played the age card, did he?

“I did!” he smiles.

Older, feistier, unfiltered. The day before, when he and Rudd taped an appearance on “The View,” Asner grabbed Barbara Walters’ tush until she squealed and ran for cover against Sherri Shepherd.

“You dirty old man!” she cried. Then he grabbed Shepherd’s knee — and, while he was at it, guest host Tim Hasselbeck’s, too.

Which begs the question: Why?

“How else are you going to connect?” Asner says, digging into his roast chicken. “Barbara’s always projected a standoffish personality, and I wanted to see if I could create some warmth between us.”

Alas, he adds, “Heat is not warmth.”

And yet warmth is what greets him in “Grace,” in which he plays Karl, a crusty German exterminator immune to the cheerful Christianity of Rudd’s character. At a preview the other day, the audience applauded as soon as Asner strode onstage.

It’s his first time on Broadway since 1989’s short-lived revival of “Born Yesterday.” Back then, its star, Madeline Kahn, called him “a 600-pound gorilla.” The critics were no kinder.

“As they say in the trades, they tore me another a - - hole,” he says, grimly. “And they never saw fit to ask me back!”

At least he had other things to fall back on: political activism, for one — not surprisingly, he’s a fierce advocate of free speech — and movies like “Elf” and “Up,” in which he voiced another cranky guy named Carl.

But he’ll never shake Lou Grant, the irascible editor. That role brought him five of his seven Emmys. And to think: Back when he was editing his high-school newspaper in Kansas City, Mo., young Asner wanted to be a journalist. His teacher told him it was no way to make a living.

“So, as you can see,” he says, “I became an overnight sensation as an actor!”

In fact, he was nearly 40 when he auditioned for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and it didn’t start well.

“Someone said, ‘Now that was a very intelligent reading,’ ” he recalls. “That means it wasn’t funny!”

He asked them to let him try it again.

“So I read it like a meshuggeneh” — crazy person — “and they laughed. Mary turned to them and said, ‘Are you sure?’ And they said, ‘That’s your Lou!’ And it worked out.”

He says he modeled Grant on his two older, gruffer brothers. “I focused on them because I didn’t have the guts to mine myself,” he says. He remembers how one of them, while driving behind a car containing their two elderly aunts, kept bumping their bumper.

“My brother would have said, ‘You know how you are? Don’t be that way!’ ” — the legendary bit of advice Lou offered Ted Baxter on his wedding day.

In all their years together, he says, the only thing between him and Moore was “love and appreciation.”

Cloris Leachman, who played Mary’s flighty neighbor Phyllis, was another story.

As he recalled fondly on “The View,” Leachman “had an ass you could carry a tray on.” And that story about how, if he lost 30 pounds, she promised to sleep with him? (Reportedly, he lost 29.)

All true, he says. “I never lie.”

Right now, says this father of four, he’s legally separated: That big gold band he’s wearing is just “wardrobe” for the play.

You can’t help but wonder why, at an age when he could be chilling in California, he’s braving the critics again. Surely he gets residuals . . .

“They get thinner and thinner as the years go by,” he says. “It’s not enough to build a fortune on. What else am I gonna do? It’s nice to make money. I’m not making that much money, but it will pay for the cleaning lady.”

The waiter appears and takes our plates — his empty, mine half-full. Asner stops him and asks me, “Don’t you want to take this home?”

No thanks, I say. It will only smell up the bus.

“It’s OK,” he says. “They’ll just think you farted.”

He lumbers to his feet; a car’s waiting outside to take him to the Cort Theatre, where the curtain goes up in less than an hour. Even so, he’s gracious to the women at the next table, who stop and make a fuss over him.

“Sure you don’t want a lift?” he asks again, after a bearhug. “Nah.”

You know how you are, Ed?

Stay that way.