Paul Newman: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies)

PAUL NEWMAN

Recent Titles in Greenwood Biographies Toni Morrison: A Biography Stephanie S. Li Halle Berry: A Biography Melissa Ewey Johnson Osama bin Laden: A Biography Thomas R. Mockaitis Tyra Banks: A Biography Carole Jacobs Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography Eric Fretz Howard Stern: A Biography Rich Mintzer Tiger Woods: A Biography, Second Edition Lawrence J. Londino Justin Timberlake: A Biography Kimberly Dillon Summers Walt Disney: A Biography Louise Krasniewicz Chief Joseph: A Biography Vanessa Gunther John Lennon: A Biography Jacqueline Edmondson Carrie Underwood: A Biography Vernell Hackett Christina Aguilera: A Biography Mary Anne Donovan

PAUL NEWMAN A Biography Marian Edelman Borden

GREENWOOD BIOGRAPHIES

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Borden, Marian Edelman. Paul Newman : a biography / Marian Edelman Borden. p. cm. — (Greenwood biographies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-38310-6 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-38311-3 (ebook) 1. Newman, Paul, 1925–2008. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title. PN2287.N44B67 2011 791.430'28092—dc22 [B] 2010028721 ISBN: 978-0-313-38310-6 EISBN: 978-0-313-38311-3 15

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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Greenwood An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

To Doctors Laura Lazarus, Beverly Drucker, and Keith Atkiss, whose skill and compassion made this book possible. With deep gratitude, Marian

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CONTENTS

Series Foreword

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

xiii

Timeline: Events in the Life of Paul Newman

xix

Chapter 1

The Boy from Ohio

1

Chapter 2

A New Beginning

9

Chapter 3

Choosing a Different Path

15

Chapter 4

Hollywood Beckons

23

Chapter 5

Blue Eyes Becomes King Cool

37

Chapter 6

Roaring to the Finish Line

49

Chapter 7

Taking on New Challenges

57

Chapter 8

The Businessman

69

Chapter 9

Taking Charity to a New Level

81

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CONTENTS

Chapter 10

The Activist

Chapter 11

The Final Years

91 101

Appendix: Works of Screen

115

Selected Bibliography

121

Index

127

SERIES FOREWORD

In response to high school and public library needs, Greenwood developed this distinguished series of full-length biographies specifically for student use. Prepared by field experts and professionals, these engaging biographies are tailored for high school students who need challenging yet accessible biographies. Ideal for secondary school assignments, the length, format and subject areas are designed to meet educators’ requirements and students’ interests. Greenwood offers an extensive selection of biographies spanning all curriculum-related subject areas including social studies, the sciences, literature and the arts, history and politics, as well as popular culture, covering public figures and famous personalities from all time periods and backgrounds, both historic and contemporary, who have made an impact on American and/or world culture. Greenwood biographies were chosen based on comprehensive feedback from librarians and educators. Consideration was given to both curriculum relevance and inherent interest. The result is an intriguing mix of the well known and the unexpected, the saints and sinners from long-ago history and contemporary pop culture. Readers will find a wide array of subject

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choices from fascinating crime figures like Al Capone to inspiring pioneers like Margaret Mead, from the greatest minds of our time like Stephen Hawking to the most amazing success stories of our day like J. K. Rowling. While the emphasis is on fact, not glorification, the books are meant to be fun to read. Each volume provides in-depth information about the subject’s life from birth through childhood, the teen years, and adulthood. A thorough account relates family background and education, traces personal and professional influences, and explores struggles, accomplishments, and contributions. A timeline highlights the most significant life events against a historical perspective. Bibliographies supplement the reference value of each volume.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the wonderful reference staff of the Larchmont Library: Frank Connelly, Paul Doherty, Liam Hegarty, June Hesler, as well as Rebecca Eller, the children’s librarian who was doing double duty during renovations. Their support and tireless sleuthing to find old articles and books, long out of print, enriched this biography immeasurably. Thanks too to interlibrary loan librarian Hui Sheng at the Westchester Library System for her fulfillment of countless requests, and to Emma Rosenblum who tracked down an especially helpful article. I am grateful to my agent, Bob Diforio, for his sound advice and constant encouragement, and to my editor, George Butler, for his patience and support. As always, much love and gratitude for my wonderful family. To borrow from Paul Newman: For my husband John, “Being married to you is the joy of my life.”

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INTRODUCTION

Paul Newman was an award-winning actor and director, an accomplished screenwriter, a triumphant race-car driver, a shrewd entrepreneur, a fervent political activist, and an imaginative, incredibly generous philanthropist. His many professional accomplishments were dwarfed by his determination to share the wealth of good luck he believed he had been given. His movies and the charities he created and supported have built for him a living legacy. Paul Leonard Newman was born on January 26, 1925, in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the younger son of Arthur and Theresa Newman. His father was a successful businessman, co-owner of Newman-Stern Company, one of the nation’s largest sporting-goods stores. Paul acted in grade school plays, but his real love was sports. By the time he got to high school, however, he was considered too small to play on the varsity teams, so he became active in the drama department. After high school, he joined the Navy, hoping to serve as a pilot in World War II. Although in his professional life Paul would be known for his gorgeous blue eyes, it turned out that he was color blind, which meant that he was unable to train as a pilot. He served as a radio operator in the

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INTRODUCTION

Pacific and was about 50 miles off the Japanese coastline when the first atomic bomb was dropped. When he returned from the war, Paul entered Kenyon College. One surprising result of his time in service was that he had grown six inches. He could finally play college football. But a barroom brawl effectively ended his varsity career before it even began. So Paul once again turned to dramatics, starring in 10 plays in two years. His college director said he had “trouble not casting Paul as the lead in every play.” Even in school, Paul was a budding entrepreneur. He started a laundry service for his fellow students that earned him plenty of spending money. His creative marketing, obvious later in Newman’s Own food company, was evident at this early stage when he offered free beer to students who used his service. Although his family expected him to join Newman-Stern, Paul instead opted to pursue summer stock after graduation from Kenyon. There he met his first wife, Jacqueline Witte. When Newman’s father unexpectedly died in May 1950, Paul and his wife returned to Shaker Heights, and he joined the business. His son, Scott, was born that year. The couple eventually had two daughters, Susan and Stephanie. Desperately unhappy working in retail, Paul was relieved when the family sold the company. He decided to move to New Haven and enter the Yale School of Drama. His ambition was to get a master’s degree so that he could teach at the college level. But by the end of his first year at Yale, he had been encouraged by agents to try his luck in New York. He gave himself the summer to see if he could make a living as an actor. Almost immediately, he began getting television jobs. Soon he was cast in Picnic, making his Broadway debut in 1953. He never did return to Yale to complete his graduate degree, although he received an honorary degree in 1988. In 1954, Paul made his first feature film, The Silver Chalice. The movie and his performance received poor reviews. He feared that his movie career was over before it had even begun. He thought that if he successfully returned to Broadway, he could overcome the devastating failure of The Silver Chalice. It worked. He received excellent notices for his role in the play The Desperate Hours. He also was cast in many live television productions. When the young actor James Dean was killed in an auto accident, Paul assumed his role in the TV play The

INTRODUCTION

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Battler about an old, punch-drunk fighter. His strong performance in that role led to his being cast in the film Somebody Up There Likes Me, the story of middleweight champion Rocky Graziano. This picture relaunched his movie career. Over the next five decades, Paul continued to act in movies and was nominated for nine Oscars. Some of his most popular films include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cool Hand Luke, The Sting, and Nobody’s Fool. He finally won an Oscar in 1986 for his performance in The Color of Money, a sequel made 25 years after the earlier hit The Hustler. In 2006, Paul was the voice of Doc Hudson, an animated 1951 Hudson Hornet, in the Pixar feature Cars. It would be the last feature film of his life. It also turned out to be the highest-grossing movie of his career. In 1959, he divorced his first wife and married actress Joanne Woodward, whom he had met while appearing in Picnic. They had three daughters together, Elinor (Nell), Melissa (Lissy), and Claire (Clea). While they were polar opposites in many ways—he loved racing, she loved ballet—they genuinely enjoyed each other’s company and supported each other’s dreams. When Paul directed his first movie, Rachel, Rachel, in 1968, it starred Joanne Woodward. She received an Academy Award nomination for her performance. Paul was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director. He helmed five other movies and in 1981 received an Emmy Award nomination for his direction of The Shadow Box. In 1984, Paul cowrote, directed, and acted in Harry & Son. In 1969, Paul starred in Winning, a movie about race-car drivers. He decided to pursue the sport himself. He had always like speed. For years he had souped up his VW with a Porsche engine. Until he had a terrible accident, he owned three motorcycles. Although far older than most beginning drivers, he quickly became successful, winning second place in 1979 in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He also co-owned Newman/Haas Racing, a Champ Car team. Eventually, he refused to accept movie work during the racing season. Paul knew that as much as he liked sports, he had never been very good at them. But with racing, he said, “I’ve realized that the only time I’ve felt physically graceful was in a race car.” He once compared his two careers: “Acting is a lot like racing. It’s the same type of discipline—one and only one person

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to depend on in your work, on the track or on the stage. Actually you need a good team around you in both careers.” Paul also dealt with adversity and tragedy. In 1978, his son, Scott, died from an accidental overdose of drugs. Scott had struggled with addictions and anger over his parents’ divorce. He had a troubled relationship with his father, and after Scott’s death, Paul was racked with grief and guilt. He founded the Scott Newman Center, a foundation dedicated to preventing drug abuse through education. Paul himself struggled with alcoholism. He finally gave up drinking hard liquor but continued to consume beer. He also was a chain smoker for decades, finally quitting in 1986. Whether it was related to his years of smoking cannot be positively proved, but more than 20 years later, Paul contracted lung cancer. In 1982, Paul Newman, with his friend author A. E. Hotchner, founded Newman’s Own, a food company. Originally started on a whim to market Paul’s personal salad-dressing recipe, the company successfully expanded into many other food products, including popcorn, salsa, spaghetti sauces, and lemonade. The labels all feature whimsical drawings of Paul Newman in various guises, with humorous descriptions of the products. His daughter, Nell, joined the company and started a successful organics food line. Paul and Hotchner decided to donate all the profits from Newman’s Own to charity. At the time of Paul’s death, they had distributed more than $280 million to a wide variety of charities, including the Hole in the Wall Camps. These summer programs are designed for children with leukemia and other lifethreatening diseases. From the first camp in Ashford, Connecticut, the project has expanded worldwide and has served more than 100,000 children, all at no cost to the families. Paul Newman was also politically active. He was liberal and generally a Democrat, although he sometimes supported independent candidates, like Ralph Nader for president in 2000. He was fiercely against the Vietnam War, which motivated him to become actively involved in the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign in 1968. Paul crisscrossed the nation, giving speeches on behalf of McCarthy, often drawing larger crowds than the candidate. His political activism placed him number 19 on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Paul called it “the highest single honor I’ve ever received.” Paul was a strong

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supporter of civil rights. He joined Martin Luther King Jr. at the famous 1963 March on Washington. He traveled to Gadsen, Alabama, to help fight for racial equality and later learned that his movies were pulled from local theaters in protest. He was an active supporter of gay rights, including same-sex marriage. He was in favor of gun control and committed to antinuclear proliferation. He was named a public delegate at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Disarmament. Paul was asked several times to run for office, but he always insisted, “I just don’t have the temperament. I’d get too impatient with all the machinery. And I’ve got too short a fuse to survive the ordeal of a campaign.” Paul was also the ultimate prankster. He was known for his practical jokes, which included sawing a director’s desk in half; later sawing the same director’s car in half (but then buying him a more expensive, sportier one to replace it); and even deep-frying yet another director’s set of deerskin gloves and serving them for lunch! Once, during the filming of Exodus, he tossed a Paul Newman look-alike dummy from a balcony, causing famed director Otto Preminger to become so distraught that he required first aid. A. E. Hotchner, a close friend and cofounder of Newman’s Own, insisted that these pranks helped Paul “keep himself loose and pliable and imbued with the mischievousness that nourished him.” Paul Newman considered himself lucky. He also characterized himself as a terrier, determined to get the bone, that is, whatever goal he set for himself. He loved being an actor; enjoyed the challenge of directing; and adored being a husband for 50 years to Joanne Woodward, father to his children, and grandfather of two. He relished the feel of speed in a race car. He insisted on being politically active because he felt a responsibility to promote the causes in which he believed. At the time of his death, at the age of 83, his children issued a statement that made clear their father’s priorities: “Our father was a rare symbol of selfless humility, the last to acknowledge what he was doing was special. Intensely private, he quietly succeeded beyond measure in impacting the lives of so many with his generosity. Always and to the end, Dad was incredibly grateful for his good fortune. He will be profoundly missed . . . but he leaves us with extraordinary inspiration to draw upon.”

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TIMELINE: EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF PAUL NEWMAN

1925 1943 1946

1949

1950

1951

Paul Leonard Newman is born in Cleveland, Ohio, on January 26. Paul enlists in the Navy and serves as a radio operator in the Pacific during World War II. Paul is discharged from the Navy and enrolls at Kenyon College in Ohio as an economics major. He joins the football team but is kicked off after a barroom brawl. He begins acting in college productions. Paul sells his college laundry business for a profit. He graduates with a degree in speech and moves to Williams Bay, Wisconsin, for a season of summer stock. He then moves to Woodstock, Illinois, for the winter season of drama. There he marries Jacqueline Witte on December 27. Arthur Newman Sr. dies on May 11, 1950. Paul and Jackie move back to Shaker Heights, and Paul joins the family business. Their first child, Alan Scott (known as Scott), is born on September 23. Newman-Stern Company is sold. Paul enters Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut.

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1952

1953

1954

1955

1956

1958

TIMELINE

Paul is in an original student production at Yale when he is approached by two theatrical agents who encourage him to try his luck in the theater. He decides to give himself a year to see if he can make it and, if not, plans to return to Yale and finish his degree. He moves Jackie and Scott to an apartment on Staten Island and begins to make the rounds of casting agents. He meets Joanne Woodward, an aspiring actress, in his agent’s office. He quickly gets television roles and is cast in Picnic. Paul makes his Broadway debut on February 19, as Alan Seymour in Picnic, a play by William Inge. Joanne Woodward is the understudy for the female roles in the play. He is accepted into the Actors Studio. Susan, Paul’s first daughter, is born on February 21, less than 48 hours after her father’s Broadway debut. He is named one of the most promising new stars by Theater World. Paul signs a five-year contract with Warner Bros. Studio. He is cast as Basil, a slave, in the biblical drama The Silver Chalice. Before the movie is completed, Paul asks his theater agents to find him another role on Broadway because he fears that the film is so bad his acting career will be over. Paul is cast as Glenn Griffin, an escaped convict, in The Desperate Hours, debuting on Broadway on February 10. His reviews are excellent. He continues to appear in live television plays, including playing George Gibbs in a production of Our Town. Paul replaces James Dean, who had been killed in an auto accident, as an old, punch-drunk fighter in The Battler. Paul is cast as middleweight boxing legend Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me. The movie is a success, and Paul’s career begins to take off. Jackie gives birth to Stephanie, their third child. He begins to drink heavily as his marriage to Jackie is threatened by his growing attachment to Joanne Woodward. Paul and Joanne Woodward appear together in The Long, Hot Summer. Paul is divorced from Jackie and marries Joanne on January 29 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Paul stars as Brick Pollitt

TIMELINE

1959

1961

1962 1963 1965 1966 1967 1968

1969

1973 1978 1979 1982

xxi

in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives. He receives the first of his nine nominations for an Oscar (he only wins once). Joanne wins an Oscar for her role in The Three Faces of Eve. Paul returns to Broadway in Sweet Bird of Youth. Joanne gives birth to Elinor Theresa Newman, nicknamed Nell, on April 8. Paul buys out his contract to Warner Bros. Studios. Paul appears as Fast Eddie in the movie The Hustler. He is nominated for an Oscar. Daughter Melissa Stewart, nicknamed Lissy, is born September 27. Paul and Joanne buy a home in Westport, Connecticut, and name it Nook House. Paul stars in Hud. He receives another Oscar nomination. Paul’s fifth daughter, Claire Olivia Newman, nicknamed Clea, is born April 21. Paul stars in Harper. Paul stars in Cool Hand Luke and receives another Oscar nod. Paul directs his first feature movie, Rachel, Rachel, starring Joanne Woodward. He wins the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. He spends many hours campaigning for Eugene McCarthy for president. Paul stars as Frank Capua, a race-car driver who dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500, in the movie Winning. It’s the beginning of a new career for Paul—professional race-car driver. He also stars in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the first of two buddy movies in which he appears with Robert Redford. Paul stars as Henry Gondorff in The Sting, which wins the Best Picture Oscar. Robert Redford costars. Scott Newman dies of a drug overdose. Paul drives in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and finishes in second place. Paul and his friend, author A. E. Hotchner, found Newman’s Own, based on Paul’s own salad-dressing recipe. They decide to donate all profits to charity.

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1983 1986 1988

1994 1995

2000 2003

2006 2007 2008

TIMELINE

Paul cofounds, with Carl Haas, Newman/Haas Racing, a Champ Car team. Paul reprises his role as Fast Eddie in the movie The Color of Money. He finally wins the Oscar. The first Hole in the Wall Camp, a summer camp for children with leukemia and other life-threatening diseases, opens in Ashford, Connecticut. The camp is named after the gang in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. To date, more than 100,000 children have been served worldwide in this and associated camps. Paul is awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Paul is the oldest driver ever to be part of a winning team in a major sanctioned race. His team wins in their class at the 24 Hours of Daytona. Paul is reported to have burned his tuxedo on his 75th birthday, eschewing all future formality. Paul is nominated for an Oscar for Road to Perdition; a Tony for the Broadway show Our Town, in which he played the Stage Manager (narrator); and an Emmy for the same role in the TV production of Our Town. Paul is the voice of Doc Hudson is the Pixar animated movie Cars, the highest-grossing movie of his career. Paul announces on May 27 that he is retiring from acting. Paul and Joanne celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary on January 29. Paul dies at home from lung cancer, surrounded by family, on September 26. His body is cremated, and his ashes are scattered at the Ashford, Connecticut, Hole in the Wall Camp.

Chapter 1

THE BOY FROM OHIO

Paul Leonard Newman was born in the middle of a blizzard on January 26, 1925. The weather was so bad that he was born at home, his parents, Art and Theresa, and year-old brother, Art, Jr., trapped inside 2100 Renrock Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The unassuming single-family home was just a few blocks away from Joseph Newman, Art’s older brother, business partner, best friend, and adored uncle of young Paul. Paul Newman’s father, Arthur Sigmund Newman, Sr., was born August 29, 1893, in Cleveland, the youngest of seven children of Hannah and Simon Newman, both Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. On legal documents, Hannah is described as being born in 1857 in either Hungary or Poland (it was a time when national boundaries were changing). Simon Newman was born in 1853 in Hungary and emigrated to this country as a young man. He became a dry-goods peddler. On October 10, 1876, Hannah and Simon were married. Their children were Minnie, Lillian, Aaron, Ottile, and Gertrude. There is a break of five years following Gertrude’s birth, and then in 1891 came Joseph, and two years later, Arthur was born. The family lived in a Jewish enclave of Cleveland.

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By the time the family was complete, Simon owned his own business and store, Newman’s Millinery, where he manufactured and sold hats. Unfortunately, Simon died just two years after Arthur’s birth. While his grandson Paul would go on to international fame and fortune, looking at the accomplishments of Paul’s father, uncles, and aunts gives a peek into the creative family from which he came. Gertrude was a noted children’s book author; Lillian wrote Yiddish verse; Ottile was a school teacher; and Aaron was a reporter, founder of two newspapers, and owned a movie theater. Joseph (Joe), the uncle closest to Paul, had a variety of distinguished careers. Joe was a poet, songwriter (he penned a few tunes especially for elementary school actor Paul), journalist, and incredibly successful businessman with younger brother Arthur. He was the president of Newman-Stern, a sporting-goods store. Arnold L. Stern was an investor in the business but didn’t work in it. Arthur (Art) was the secretary/ treasurer. Prior to joining the sporting-goods business, Art was also a journalist, although not as successful as his older brother Joe. Like the football player who runs triumphantly for a touchdown only to discover that he has scored for the opposing team, Art got a fantastic scoop as a young reporter for the Cleveland Press only to be connected to the wrong phone number—the newsroom of the rival paper, the Cleveland News. Art’s newspaper career was over. He joined big brother Joe in business. The two brothers were complete opposites. Joe was funny, creative (he wrote the annual musical revue for the City Club for more than 30 years), and inventive. Art was serious, stern, and straight-laced. He was a man of his word—which is why in the midst of the Great Depression, the Newman-Stern Company could still get credit from suppliers; they knew that Art Newman would always pay his debts. Less is known about Paul’s mother, Theresa Fetzer Newman. She was born in Hungary or Austria. Her date of birth is unclear. Paul often told the story about his mother’s deathbed confession: “ ‘Paul you have to excuse me, I’ve been lying all these years. I’m not eighty-three, I’m eighty-seven.’ And when we took her back to Cleveland to be buried next to my father, her sister was there. And I said, ‘You know, Mother said that she had been lying all these years, and that she wasn’t

THE BOY F ROM OHIO

3

eighty-three, she was eighty-seven.’ And her sister said, ‘Baloney! She was ninety-three!’ ”1 Theresa was young when she came to America, between three and four. It’s not even clear with whom she came. Her father’s first name was Stephen, but the last name appears with different spellings. While Theresa spelled it Fetzer, most of her siblings spelled it Fetsko. It also appears as Fetzko, Felsko, and Fecke. We don’t know her birth mother’s name. But we have a record that her father married Mary Polinak (also spelled Polenak) on August 11, 1902. This was a blended family, each bringing children from a previous marriage. Together they raised seven children, Theresa, Mae, Jewell, Andrew, Steve, Anna, and Michael. They were Catholic. Stephen worked as a laborer, shipbuilder, and bricklayer. Mary worked in a mill. Not only is her age in question, but Theresa also appears to have had an earlier marriage, although little is known about it. Nor is there a marriage license from Cuyahoga County for her nuptials to Art, despite the fact that all their parents and siblings had gotten their marriage licenses there. It must have been a civil ceremony. Art was Jewish, although not particularly observant. Nonetheless, he was a member his whole life at a temple on Woodland Avenue in west Cleveland. Despite being raised Catholic, Theresa converted to Christian Science when her children were young. While Christian Scientists eschew medical treatment in favor of prayer and meditation, Theresa did seek regular medical care for her sons. She did not press her children to follow her beliefs. Paul listed Christian Science as his religion on his college application to Kenyon, but that was primarily because he feared that listing Jewish as his religion would put him at a disadvantage. Kenyon had been founded by Bishop Philander Chase of the Episcopal Church. Chapel attendance at the college was required until the 1960s. And at many colleges in the United States, there were still quotas on the number of Jews who could be admitted. Paul and his brother did receive Jewish instruction through elementary school, but Paul did not practice Judaism as an adult. Still, when asked, he self-identified with his father’s faith because “because being Jewish is more demanding.”2 Just as brother Joe was so very different from Art, so too was his wife Theresa. Art was sober, careful with money, and very focused on

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PAUL NEWMAN

business (he worked six days a week). Theresa tended to be volatile and wanted more. She loved the arts and regularly attended the shows that were produced at the Hanna Theater. Her son speculated that she was a frustrated actress. In another time and a different generation, it might have been Theresa Newman you would know. Instead, she encouraged her younger son to become involved in local theater. Perhaps because of her poor childhood, Theresa also wanted the trappings of wealth. She wanted the bigger house (and got it). Coming from a paycheck-to-paycheck background, Theresa needed the security of “things.” As Paul described his mother, “She was raised in a very poor family and had a sense of values that we pooh-pooh right now— you know, materialistic things, trying to get two cars in the garage.”3 In contrast, Art never wanted his children to take things for granted. Despite his father owning the largest sporting-goods store in Cleveland, Paul didn’t get his first baseball mitt until he was 10. Paul had a paper route, and as he and his brother Art Jr. got older, both had to work in the store on Saturdays, coming in earlier than the rest of the help and staying later. As a teenager, Paul also worked at Danny Budin’s corned beef palace in Shaker Heights. Maybe this was the start of his interest in food, later translated into Newman’s Own product line. As for his brother, Arthur Jr., there was the usual sibling rivalry growing up, especially because they were just a year apart in age. He described their relationship as belligerent, but as adults, they grew very close. When he was two years old, Paul and his family moved to 2983 Brighton Road, an 11-room English Tudor in the more affluent suburb of Shaker Heights. It wasn’t the biggest or splashiest house in the neighborhood, but it cost $35,000—close to a half million dollars in today’s money. This would be Paul Newman’s childhood home. Growing up in Shaker Heights, Paul’s childhood was fairly typical of the times, with a heavy emphasis on sports—football, baseball, and skating on frozen ponds. For all his boyish enthusiasm, however, Paul was a mediocre athlete. In addition, while Paul was average sized until adolescence, he seemed to stop growing in high school, so he was one of the smallest of his class. His height effectively ended any hopes of a varsity career.

THE BOY F ROM OHIO

5

Perhaps to compensate for being too small and uncoordinated for the school sports teams, he had a growing interest in theater. At Malvern Elementary School, Paul played the role of the organ grinder in a class play. He was a bit of a clown, partially to offset his natural reticence, so he hammed it up, singing in mock Italian. He later admitted, “I made up in volume what I lacked in tone.”4 But if you are going to mark his big theatrical debut, it was at the age of seven, as the court jester in The Travails of Robin Hood. His Uncle Joe had written a song for him, and although he was a big hit, Paul felt unnerved, a sensation he would continue to feel throughout his professional career. Luckily, discomfort onstage wasn’t reason enough to end a budding theatrical career—in fact, it may have been a motivating force. Paul Newman never backed down from a challenge. At the age of 11, his mother enrolled Paul in the Curtain Pullers, a children’s program at the Cleveland Play House. It was an opportunity for kids to study and perform. Famous alumni of the program include Joel Grey (who later went on to star in Cabaret on stage and screen, as well as in the Broadway production of Wicked), Eleanor Parker (famous screen actress who appeared in The Sound of Music), and Jack Weston (who starred on Broadway, as well as on screen in Dirty Dancing and Wait Until Dark). In 1936, Paul played the lead in St. George and the Dragon. His Uncle Joe wrote a song for Paul to sing in the production. The show was a hit. But the young actor had a big complaint—he wanted to play the dragon! He claimed he was too big for the costume. Kidding aside, there was actually a larger point that would remain a constant throughout his career. Paul Newman was always interested in character roles. He didn’t see himself as the romantic leading man, despite the fact that even as a child, he was extraordinarily good looking. As his mother commented to a reporter in 1959, “He [Paul] was such a beautiful little boy. In a way, it was a shame to waste so much beauty on a boy.” As Paul insisted, “I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.”5 But there was also a tension within the household about Paul’s growing participation in theater. Paul remembers that his mother was supportive of his work on stage, but his father considered it stargazing and definitely not the life he envisioned for his younger son. He expected

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his children to take over Newman-Stern Company. The rest were childish dreams. He worried that there was no stability in an actor’s life. In fact, one of Paul Newman’s greatest disappointments was that his father did not live to see him make a successful living as an actor: “I think he always thought of me as a lightweight. He treated me like he was disappointed in me a lot of the time, and he had every right to be. It has been one of the greatest agonies of my life that he could never know. I wanted desperately to show him that somehow, somewhere along the line, I could cut the mustard. And I never got a chance, never got a chance.”6 Paul graduated high school in January 1943, and four days before his 18th birthday, he enlisted in the Navy. It was the height of World War II, and Paul wanted to be a Navy pilot. While waiting to be called up, Paul enrolled at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. His older brother was already a student there. Academically, Paul was a mediocre student. He frequently explained that he “majored in beer drinking.”7 He joined a fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, and adopted the nickname “Gus.” Paul/Gus was known as a good jazz pianist, especially the boogie-woogie, and played at fraternity parties. Although he was technically a business major, it certainly didn’t interfere with his carousing. He quickly got involved in theater productions, winning the lead role of Speed McFarland in The Milky Way. But almost as soon as the term had ended, on June 6, 1943, Paul was called up to the Navy. He had always wanted to be a pilot. “I loved to fly,” he explained years later.8 However, during physicals for training, those legendary blue eyes, his trademark throughout his acting career, failed him. It turns out that Paul Newman was color blind. Once he was booted out of the pilot training program, he was assigned to Officer Candidate School (OCS). Young and still very small for his age, barely 100 pounds and five feet three inches tall, OCS wasn’t a good fit: “The first time I got in my uniform, I was walking down to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. A guy looked over at me . . . I had my sailor outfit, my hat on. He looked at me and said, “Aren’t you a little old to be in the Sea Scouts.”9 When that program didn’t work out, Paul was sent to a traditional boot camp and trained to be a rear-seat radioman and gunner in torpedo bombers.

THE BOY F ROM OHIO

7

After training, he was assigned to the war in the Pacific, stationed at Eniwetok, Guam, Okinawa, and Saipan. By his own admission, “I was a pretty good radio man but a terrible gunner.” Although he saw very little action, his parents were understandably worried. “I don’t think they ever forgave me for volunteering for torpedo duty. That was not fair to either of them. That worried them and pissed them off.”10 Newman’s luck was in full force in May 1945 when his crew was ordered to practice landings on the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill. But his pilot developed an earache, and so another crew was sent in their place. A few days later, two kamikaze pilots attacked the Bunker Hill, killing nearly 400 sailors, including every member of Newman’s squadron. “When you miss something like that because your pilot happened to have an earache . . . wow!” He later further explained, “You can’t say God is looking after you because He gave your pilot an earache but put the fifteen other guys in coffins.”11 Why was he spared? He said he didn’t know but acknowledged that lady luck seemed to be on his side. He was about 50 miles away from Hiroshima, on the aircraft carrier Hollandia, when, on August 7, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped. Paul admitted that he didn’t fully understand the ramifications of the bombing. As an adult, however, Paul Newman became an outspoken activist against nuclear proliferation. In 1982, he debated on live television another screen legend, former president of the National Rifle Association, Charlton Heston, about the merits of imposing a freeze on nuclear weapons. He was honorably discharged from the Navy on January 21, 1946, just five days before his 21st birthday. What did the Navy and the war experience do for Paul Newman? He received five citations: a Navy Combat Action Ribbon, the American Area Campaign Medal, the Asian Pacific Campaign Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. He had also suffered his first real heartbreak. He had been “very attached,” as he described it, to a young woman in Ohio. Midway through his time in service, she dumped him. Of course, one wonders how her life would have been different had she married the young sailor from Shaker Heights.

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PAUL NEWMAN

There was also a tangible difference in Paul Newman. For a young man who was so scrawny when he entered the service that he joked in later years that he “got through the whole war on only two razor blades,” he left the Navy having grown six inches and added more than 50 pounds.12 Maybe now playing college football was a possibility.

NOTES 1. Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009, 25. 2. Corliss, Richard. “Remembering Paul Newman, Humanitarian and Actor.” Time (September 27, 2008), http://www.time.com/time/ arts/article/0,8599,1845133,00.html. 3. Greenberg, Peter S. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (April 1983), http://www.playboy.com/articles/1983-interview-withpaul-newman. 4. Levy, Paul Newman, 29. 5. Ibid. 6. Worrell, Denise, John Skow, and Elaine Dutka. “Paul Newman: Verdict on a Superstar.” Time (December 6, 1982), http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,923114,00.html. 7. Levy, Paul Newman, 36. 8. Ibid., 38. 9. Latham, Aaron. “Paul Newman Takes the Stand.” Rolling Stone (January 20, 1983), http://www.rollingstone.com. 10. Levy, Paul Newman, 39. 11. Ibid., 42. 12. Ibid., 41.

Chapter 2

A NEW BEGINNING

No longer the size of a Sea Scout, in fact, now an honorably discharged, 5-feet-9 (or 10, according to some reports) veteran, Paul Newman returned home and applied to Kenyon College. He insisted, later on, that he chose Kenyon because it was an all-male school (the college didn’t accept women until 1970). At Ohio University, he explained, he had been “much more interested in the ladies, than I was in my studies.”1 However, even without female students to distract him, Paul would always maintain that he graduated magna cum lager (beer). Kenyon was located in quiet Gambier, Ohio, where the Amish and Mennonite residents still drove carts and horses up and down the main street (this would become important around Paul’s graduation). On his application, he acknowledged that his primary extracurricular activity had been dramatics, but his long-term goal was to get a broad liberal arts education and then apply for a postgraduate degree in business administration. He anticipated entering retailing—and knew that the family company awaited him. He finally got to join the football team, although he later admitted, “I was one of the worst football players in the history of Kenyon.”2

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Turns out that he didn’t remain a football player for long—a particular incident of college partying would signal the end of his college athletic career and the start of his acting future. Quite simply, it was a barroom brawl between Kenyon football players and the local boys in Mount Vernon, Ohio, a town near campus. Initially, only two of the players were arrested, but four others followed the police car and stormed the station, prepared to argue the case—but only ended up getting arrested themselves. Paul Newman was one of the four. When the dust settled, all six players were kicked off the football team. The original two arrested were fined and given 30 days in jail, but the sentence was suspended. Both were expelled from Kenyon. The charges against the other four, including Paul, were dropped, but the college put all four on probation. But the more serious problem that Paul faced was that the incident was reported on the front page of the Cleveland News. Art Newman and the Newman-Stern company were mentioned. Paul’s father was livid. While Paul was paying his own way through college on the GI Bill, he never wanted to disappoint his father. He continued as a mediocre economics student, though having a good time was his primary activity. But more than 35 years before he would launch Newman’s Own, his food company, Paul was already demonstrating that he could be a successful entrepreneur. For example, on Kenyon dance weekends, he would buy corsages and bouquets at a wholesale flower shop and then sell them at a premium for classmates to give to their dates. But his real campus moneymaker began shortly after the bar incident. Paul rented a storefront and started his own student laundry depot on Gambier’s main street. Another company did the actual laundering. He made about $60 per week, the equivalent of about $600 in today’s money. To entice students to drop off their clothes, he offered free beer to everyone who used the service. Newman’s luck would appear, again, when Paul went to sell the business in his senior year. The new owner continued the policy of offering free beer, but unfortunately, an extremely drunk patron tried to perform a lewd act on a horse tied up outside the laundry. The business was shut down the very next day. Luckily, Paul Newman escaped blame for this escapade.

A NEW BEGINNING

11

Besides all the carousing and the moneymaking deals, by his junior year, Paul would return to an activity that scared him, challenged him, and intrigued him. In November 1947, he made his stage debut at Kenyon—as Hildy Johnson, the lead role in The Front Page. Over the next two years, under the direction of Professor James E. Michael, Paul would appear in or work on nine plays. Later he would help fund the James E. Michael Professorship in Playwriting, named for the man credited with establishing the college’s modern drama program and who once remarked that he had “trouble not casting Paul as the lead in every play.”3 Those plays included The Front Page, Antigone, The Alchemist, R.U.R., Charley’s Aunt, Ghosts, The Taming of the Shrew, Heartbreak House, and Rude Awakening (a play written by James Michael). Paul dressed in drag for the delightful farce Charley’s Aunt. The play had special meaning for the Kenyon community. It was produced less than a week after the Old Kenyon Fire of February 27, 1949, which had claimed the lives of nine students. The campus was grieving and welcomed the comic relief of the play. In the memoriam to Newman published by Kenyon after the actor’s death in 2008, it was noted that the production of Charley’s Aunt “helped to lift spirits in the mourning campus.”4 A review in the campus newspaper at the time noted, “Dressed in demure black, [Paul Newman] looked and acted convincingly enough to convince almost all that he might be the real aunt.”5 Later in the final semester of his senior year, he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the Kenyon Revue, later described as “the most rousing student musical in recent Kenyon history.” His 1961 honorary degree citation noted, “That production caused a high mortality among faculty and administration egos, and almost decided the Dean of the College to take up another line of business.” Paul had played the dean.6 By that point, he had changed his major from economics to English and speech, which encompassed the drama department. His grades had not noticeably improved: “I think they were generous to me. I think a lot of my grades were below average, but then enough were above average that they just said, ‘Why don’t we just give the guy four C’s and let him get out of here?’ ”7

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PAUL NEWMAN

Despite the respect he garnered at Kenyon, in retrospect, Paul was his own harshest critic: “I was probably one of the worst college actors in history. I didn’t know anything about acting. I had no idea what I was doing. I learned my lines by rote and simply said them, without spontaneity, without any idea of dealing with the forces around me onstage, without knowing what it meant to act and to react.”8 But he didn’t yet know what he didn’t know. And so literally on graduation day, Paul packed his bags and headed to Williams Bay, Wisconsin, for the summer stock season at the Belfry Theater. In looking back, Paul insisted that his decision to head for Wisconsin was really more a rejection of his future at the Newman-Stern company in Cleveland: “I grew up with the idea that I was going into the sporting goods store. My whole family, including a couple of uncles, took it for granted . . . I wasn’t ‘searching for my identity.’ I didn’t have greasepaint in my blood. I was just running away from the family retail business and from merchandising. I just couldn’t find any romance in it. Acting was a happy alternative to a way of life that meant nothing to me.”9 He was a bust as an athlete; academically, he had been mediocre at best. But in theater, whether he thought himself credible or not, he had always succeeded: “I was instinctively pursuing the only thing I’d ever done really well.” He appeared in nine plays in nine weeks. It was repertory theater, so each week brought a new production. But that also meant very little time for rehearsal—something in his later career he always demanded, even for film roles. Instead, Paul felt that in summer stock, “the only thing you do with those, in such a short time to prepare, is to develop your bad mannerisms, or discover possibly successful mannerisms—but mannerisms nevertheless. Sure, what can you do in four days of rehearsal? You can hope to Christ that you can remember your lines, and that’s about as far as it goes.”10 But two important things happened in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. First, the acting bug didn’t die at the end of the summer. Instead, despite his frustration with the frenetic pace of repertory theater, Paul took a job with the Woodstock Players, a repertory company located in Woodstock, Illinois. Second, in Wisconsin, he’d met Jacqueline (Jackie) Emily Witte, an aspiring actress. She followed him to Woodstock and,

A NEW BEGINNING

13

on December 27, 1949, became the first Mrs. Paul Newman. Paul was 24; Jackie was only 19. She hadn’t yet finished college. Art Newman Jr. was his brother’s best man. But repertory work wouldn’t make anyone wealthy. The couple settled in rented rooms and a shared bathroom (for $10 a month). As the winter season of the company ended, Paul took a job at a local farm, stacking corn in the field. He was looking for another summer stock job when he got a call that would change his life: his father was dying. Jackie, who was pregnant, and Paul immediately left for Cleveland. On Thursday, May 11, 1950, Art Sr. died. The funeral was held the following Sunday, Mother’s Day. Paul, as expected, joined the family business. It was the least he could do to make up for what he felt was the huge disappointment he had been in his father’s eyes. As he sadly explained many years later: “One of the great anguishes of my life is that he didn’t see my success. He thought I was a ne’er-do-well.”11 But even if joining the family company made Paul feel like he was somehow atoning for years of partying and a general lack of responsibility, it didn’t mean he was any happier in business. “I couldn’t relate to the romance of retailing. It just wasn’t a good match,” he said.12 The irony is that many years later he was an outstanding businessman who knew exactly how to market and promote Newman’s Own products. Paul and Jackie settled down in Bedford, Ohio, just outside Cleveland. On September 23, 1950, their son, Alan Scott (always called Scott) was born. Paul’s discontent with his life with Newman-Stern Sporting Goods finally ended when the store was sold. The new owners took over on October 1. Paul was at loose ends and took a job as the manager of a driving range outside Cleveland. He would attend shows at the Play House and watching other actors on stage was difficult. He found work on local radio and TV stations and even did some directing at a nearby community theater. He decided that he would go to graduate school, and not just any graduate school, but the Yale School of Drama! He had nearly $2,000 if he combined his savings, the remainder of his GI Bill benefits, and a small inheritance from his father. His goal was not to be a great actor, but to get a master’s degree in theater and return to Kenyon to teach.

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Later on, he was blunt about his decision making: “I was going to Yale as a safety net.” Paul spoke honestly about his ambition. “I had no stars in my eyes or aspirations to be a Broadway actor, but I did want to be in some part of the theater, and a master’s degree always protects you. You can teach at Kenyon, which I would have loved to have done.”13

NOTES 1. Greenberg, “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (April 1983), http://www.playboy.com/articles/1983-interview-with-paul-new man. 2. Bosworth, Patricia. “The Newman Chronicles.” Vanity Fair (September 2008), http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/09/new man200809. 3. Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009, 49. 4. Kenyon College. “Paul Newman ’49, In Appreciation.” Kenyon College, http://www.kenyon.edu/x42599.xml. 5. Ibid. 6. Groberg, Dan. “Paul Newman ’49.” The Kenyon Collegian (October 2, 2008), http://media.www.kenyoncollegian.com/media/storage/ paper821/news/2008/10/02/News/Paul-Newman.49-3466999.shtml#4. 7. Lax, Eric. Newman. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1996, 15. 8. Levy, Paul Newman, 49. 9. Oumano, Elena. Paul Newman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, 57. 10. Levy, Paul Newman, 54. 11. Ibid., 59. 12. Ibid., 60. 13. Newman, Paul. Interview with Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York, June 1959.

Chapter 3

CHOOSING A DIFFERENT PATH

In the fall of 1951, Paul, Jackie, and young Scott headed for New Haven. Paul had spent several months in that city when he had been in the Navy, prior to being kicked out of the pilot training program because he was color blind. The family rented an apartment in a threefamily house. Jackie began to get occasional work as a model in New York City (about a two-hour train ride away). To augment the family income, Paul became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. Even 50 years later, he still bragged, “I’m just saying that at Yale, I ran out of money and had a wife and a child. So that Christmas, I went out and in ten days sold $1,200 worth of Encyclopedia Brittanica.”1 That’s the equivalent of more than $10,000 in today’s dollars. For someone who didn’t want to be a businessman, Paul Newman was exceptionally good at it. But the primary reason they were in New Haven was for Paul to attend the demanding, three-year master’s degree program in directing at the Yale School of Drama. No longer could he coast on his talent. Despite the acclaim he received at Kenyon for his acting, Paul dismissed it: “I had no idea what I was doing. I learned my lines by rote

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and simply said them, without spontaneity, without any idea of dealing with the forces around me onstage, without knowing what it meant to think and react.”2 At Yale, much more was expected. His first role, in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, terrified him once he read the script. Years later Paul recalled those emotions and what he did to overcome that fear. “I’ve always considered myself an emotional Republican. I’m not very good at revealing myself. I cover up for it by telling terrible dirty jokes. That first time, when I read a stage direction—‘Weeping is heard off-stage’—I didn’t know what to do. But there I was in drama school. I’d left a good-paying job and I said, ‘Well, kiddo, better do it or go back home.’ So I took the script down to the basement and worked on the scene, and that performance was probably as full and rich as anything I’ve done.”3 Although he intended to focus on directing while at Yale, still thinking that he would return to Kenyon or another college to run the theater program, he took several acting classes that year. He knew that he needed help with showing emotion on stage: “I was terrorized by the emotional requirements of being an actor. Acting is like letting your pants down: you’re exposed.”4 That first year at Yale, Paul was in at least three full-length plays, as well as a dozen one-act plays. His teachers encouraged him to try his luck as an actor over the summer in New York City. Plus he had an ace in the hole. Two New York agents, Audrey Woods and William Liebling, had seen Paul in a play at the end of the semester. As he recalled, Liebling came up to him after the performance and suggested that Paul should look him up if he ever came to New York. If nothing worked out, he would return to New Haven in the fall for a second year of graduate school. But once again, Newman’s luck held. He moved the family to Staten Island to a small apartment that rented for $60 a month. Jackie’s aunt lived nearby, so they had an available babysitter. While continuing to sell encyclopedias, Paul also began to make a daily commute, via the Staten Island ferry, to New York. Money was tight, but Paul was determined: “I had one decent suit in those days, an old seersucker. And I’d put it on every morning. I’d start out at eight every morning, take the ferry to Manhattan, make the rounds of the casting agents, follow up all the tips in the trade papers, and then get

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back to Staten Island to peddle encyclopedias.” With only one suit to his name, Paul later laughed when he recalled casting agents’ secretaries declaring, “The guy in the white seersucker is here again.”5 In just a few weeks, he’d landed small roles in the hot new medium— live television. MCA, a major talent agency, represented him. On the television show You Are There, which aired live recreations of historic events, he played Socrates, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and Nathan Hale. Soon he landed a recurring role on a popular show The Aldrich Family. The pay, $50 a week, was enough for him to give up selling encyclopedias. He decided to stay in New York rather than return to Yale. His next step, becoming a member of the prestigious Actors Studio, was without doubt an incredible example of Paul’s talent—and his luck. Admission to the Actors Studio was rigorous. Few made it past the required two auditions. While he didn’t think he was ready to even apply yet for membership, Paul agreed to help out a friend—a young actress who needed someone to play opposite her during her second audition. Her original partner was unavailable. The scene was from Tennessee Williams’ Battle of Angels. Discounting his performance, Paul later recalled, “during my audition they mistook terror—which is what I felt—for performed emotion.” Ironically, the actress who was auditioning wasn’t offered admission to the Studio. Instead, Paul, who hadn’t actually even applied, was admitted!6 Admission became a turning point in his career. Paul often commented on the importance of joining this prestigious group. “The Actors Studio, whether they like it or not, has either credit or blame for what I’ve become as an actor. I learned everything I’ve learned about acting at the Actors Studio.”7 It was here that he learned to unlock the emotional side of his acting. He was surrounded by other talented actors who would go on to dominate the theater and movies for the next 30 years, including Marlon Brando, James Dean, Julie Harris, Karl Malden, Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Rod Steiger, and Eli Wallach. Much later in his career, Paul became president of the Actors Studio. Around the same time, William Liebling, the agent Paul had met at Yale, got him an audition for Picnic, a new play by William Inge. Paul thought he had been unimpressive at the tryout. Liebling managed to

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get Paul a second chance, this time auditioning for the play’s director, Josh Logan. Picnic is set in a small Kansas town in the 1950s. Hal, a virile, sexy, shady drifter has come to visit Alan Seymour, an old college friend. Over the course of the play, Hal ends up stealing his buddy’s girlfriend, Madge. Paul was cast in a small role as a smart-aleck paperboy. But during rehearsals, the director approached the playwright about some changes he thought were needed in the script. Originally, Alan Seymour was older, less sexy than Hal. The romantic triangle of Hal, Madge, and Alan didn’t spark. Instead, Logan suggested that Inge rewrite the role so that Alan was younger than Hal—and the director also suggested that Paul Newman replace the original actor in the role. Newman’s luck struck again. Paul would make his Broadway debut— but no longer as a bit player. Plus, he was also asked to understudy Hal, the lead character. Picnic was important for Paul’s career but also would play a pivotal role in his private life as well. He was still married to Jackie and was now the father of two; his first daughter, Susan, was born February 21, 1953. But playing the understudy to the female lead in Picnic was Joanne Woodward, a young actress from Georgia, who in a few years would become the second (and last) Mrs. Paul Newman. Paul and Joanne had met a few months earlier in the offices of Maynard Morris, the MCA agent. Paul’s appointment with Morris had run long, which meant that Joanne was left sitting in the waiting room. As Paul recalled, “I saw her coming out of the door at MCA, the theatrical agency, and I just thought, jeez, what an extraordinarily pretty girl . . . I said hello.” For Joanne, who had been kept waiting to see Morris, the first meeting was less auspicious. As Joanne recalled, “I was hot, sweaty and my hair was all stringy around my neck. He [Morris] brought out a pretty-looking young man in a seersucker suit, all pretty like an Arrow Collar ad, and said, ‘This is Paul Newman,’ and I hated him on sight, but he was so funny and pretty and neat.”8 Picnic and Paul both received great reviews when the play opened on Broadway on February 19, 1953. Playwright William Inge won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Paul was named one of the year’s promising personalities by the magazine Theater World. Even six months after the

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opening, when the New York Times revisited the show for a second look, the critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, “When Picnic was new did we fully appreciate the taste and insight of Paul Newman’s acting as Alan Seymour, the rich suitor? If not, let this stand as belated recognition.”9 When the star playing Hal went on vacation, Paul had an opportunity to fill in. He hoped that it would be his ticket to keeping the part for the road company. Josh Logan was unimpressed. The director was blunt, “Well, it was a very interesting performance, but you don’t carry any sexual threat at all.” Logan later explained that the part of Hal demanded an actor who could be “low down.” The director pointed out that the young actor didn’t have the life experience to play the role convincingly: “Paul was a well-bred kid with plenty of money, I guess, who had been to the best schools, the best colleges, he just wasn’t Hal.”10 Paul was devastated by the criticism, but later conceded, “At that particular point, I probably didn’t. That sort of thing has a lot to do with conviction.”11 Of course, later in his film career, sexy and Paul Newman were synonymous. Josh Logan had some specific advice for the young actor. Get in shape. For Paul that meant working out six hours every day in the gym—and eventually he did take over the lead. Logan later commented on the growth of Paul Newman, the actor, from the time he was cast in Picnic to his later film career. Paul’s such a bright man—he was such a brilliant person that he was able to conquer that upbringing of his and go back to the raw self that he could show—and he’s gotten more and more so as the years have gone by. I can’t believe that the Paul Newman that I knew is the Paul Newman of today—it’s unbelievable that he could have gone that far back into his ego, his realities, I can’t give you the reason for it, except that he’s an extraordinary man because of that. To be able to bury all of that strict upbringing— all that money, all that ease of life—and become a rough-hewn person, which he was in many of the pictures I’ve seen him in, it’s just a miracle to me, and it’s one of his greatest assets, one of his greatest achievements.12

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The pay from Picnic, $200 a week for playing both Alan Seymour and understudying the lead, was enough for Paul to move his family to a garden apartment in Queens Village. It was an easy commute to Broadway. The 14-month run of the show, Paul later mused, was again a lucky break: “I could just as easily have landed in a flop which closed in a few days. But instead, there I was with no financial responsibilities for over a year, able to continue my studies at the Actors Studio and appear on Broadway at the same time.”13 Plus he was continuing to land television roles. He especially enjoyed playing roles in the CBS series You Are There. They were compelling parts like Brutus in Julius Caesar and Plato. Even at this early stage of his career, he wanted to be a character actor, not just a pretty face. And with the end of Picnic, new opportunities were being offered. Paul Newman accepted his first film role. He sent Jackie and the two children to her family in Wisconsin, and he was off to Hollywood.

NOTES 1. Greenberg, Peter S. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (April 1983), http://www.playboy.com/articles/1983-interview-with-paulnewman. 2. Lax, Eric. Newman. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1996, 18. 3. Kakutani, Michiko. “Movie Star Seeks Career Opportunity.” New York Times (February 9, 1981), C15. 4. Worrell, Denise, John Skow, and Elaine Dutka. “Paul Newman: Verdict on a Superstar.” Time (December 6, 1982), http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,923114,00.html. 5. Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009, 71. 6. Greenberg, “Playboy Interview.” 7. Levy, Paul Newman, 74. 8. Morella, Joe, and Edward Z. Epstein. Paul and Joanne. New York: Delacorte, 1989, 18, 19. 9. Atkinson, Brooks. “ ‘Picnic’ Revisited: Life in a Kansas Community Honestly Drawn in William Inge’s New Play.” New York Times (August 30, 1953), X1. 10. Morella and Epstein, Paul and Joanne, 23.

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11. Dowd, Maureen. “Testing Himself.” New York Times Magazine (September 28, 1986), SM16. 12. Morella and Epstein, Paul and Joanne, 23. 13. Parsons, Louella O. “We Love Working Together.” Los Angeles Herald Examiner (February 3, 1963), H1, H3.

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Chapter 4

HOLLYWOOD BECKONS

The average salary in 1954 was $76 a week. So it’s no surprise that an offer of $1,000 a week was hard to resist for Paul, who had a wife and two children to support. But Hollywood, he knew, was more than a hefty paycheck. It exacted its full pound of flesh. This was the time when the Hollywood studios still held all the cards in negotiations. On April 9, 1954, Paul signed a five-year contract with Warner Bros. Pictures. He would receive a raise of $250 per week in each of the next four years, and a bump to $500 more per week in the final year of the contract—a weekly salary of $2,500! In exchange for more money as an actor than he had ever made, Paul agreed to appear in whatever movie they assigned him and granted them the right to use his name, voice, likeness, acts, poses, plays, and appearances. He did receive a provision in the contract that permitted him to go to New York each year, for not more than nine months, to appear in a “first-class stage presentation.” However, the contract would be suspended during that period, and the time tacked on to the end. The first weeks in California were troubling. He met with executive Sam Spiegel, who had once changed his name to S. P. Eagle.

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He wanted Paul to change his name to something more American, which was code for something that sounded less Jewish. Paul refused and, when pressed, agreed, if he could change it to S. P. Newman. The subject was dropped. He also lost the part of a lifetime to James Dean, another young actor. They both auditioned for the coveted role of Cal Trask in East of Eden. But Dean looked the part of the troubled farm youth (having been raised on a farm in Indiana), while Paul still looked like a kid from the suburbs. Instead, Paul’s first movie was The Silver Chalice, and Paul always insisted that he was lucky it wasn’t his last. He played Basil, a Greek slave who was the sculptor of the silver chalice used at the Last Supper. According to Paul, his costume was “a cocktail dress.” The short toga did nothing to flatter what Paul considered his “bony legs” and did nothing to enrich a dismal script that had lines like, “Helena, is it really you? What a joy!”1 The reviews were equally bad. John McCarter in The New Yorker wrote, “Newman delivered his lines with the emotional fervor of a Putnam Division conductor announcing local stops.”2 Ouch. Paul was so embarrassed by the movie that in 1963, just before a local television station in Los Angeles was to feature it for a week, he paid $1,200 for an ad in the Los Angeles Times that read: “Paul Newman apologizes every night this week.” Unfortunately, the ad boomeranged. People watched the film out of curiosity, and ratings were sky high for the turkey. Years later, in an interview with the New York Times, Paul offered the lessons he learned from acting in The Silver Chalice. “It did one thing for me, though. It enabled me to vow that I’d never make another costume picture.” Paul also said that he’d learned that acting demanded more than memorizing a script: “If you want to survive, you have to show your ass. You can’t walk in and play it safe.”3 Terrified that he had ruined his career his first time at bat, Paul invoked the clause in his contract that allowed him to return to the theater. As he recalled years later, “I called my agents in New York, and told them, ‘You’d better have me on a stage when this thing is released or I’m dead!’ ”4 The play was The Desperate Hours. Paul played

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Glenn Griffin, a psychotic killer who with two other escaped convicts held a family hostage in their home while awaiting a package of getaway money. It was a role diametrically different from the Greek slave Basil. The Silver Chalice opened in January 1955, and both Paul and the movie were thoroughly trashed. But The Desperate Hours opened a month later to rave reviews. The New York Times called the play “a literate thriller,” and added, “Paul Newman plays the boss thug with a wildness that one is inclined to respect.”5 Besides appearing in a hit Broadway play, returning to New York permitted Paul to return to television. He appeared in a musical production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra, a play he would appear in again 48 years later on Broadway. He starred in The Death of Billy the Kid, a teleplay by Gore Vidal,

Actors Paul Newman, Patricia Peardon, and Nancy Coleman in the play The Desperate Hours at the Barrymore Theatre in New York, May 3, 1955. AP Photo.

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who would later become a close friend of both Joanne and Paul. In 1958, he reprised his role in the movie, which had been retitled The Left-Handed Gun. It was the golden age of television, and Paul enjoyed the opportunity to play such a wide variety of parts. Years later, he would regretfully comment on the state of modern television: “[Television’s] huge appetite has accelerated the exhaustion of talent and the exhaustion of imagination. And coupled with that, of course, was the need to sell product and design things for the lowest common denominator, and the lowest common denominator kept dropping and dropping until you really don’t know where the lowest common denominator is now.”6 Luck, good and bad, played a critical role in his next career move. In October 1955, in a live TV production of The Battler, one of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, Paul was scheduled to play Nick Newman, the narrator. The lead role of the 55-year-old, washed up, punch-drunk fighter was to be played by James Dean. But on September 30, Dean was killed when he crashed his Porsche while driving at more than 100 miles per hour. The producers begged Paul to take the starring role, but Paul refused, insisting “I didn’t want to gain anything as a result of someone else’s tragedy.”7 But because it was so close to presentation and the director couldn’t find a suitable replacement, Paul finally agreed. The show did several things for Paul’s career and life. First, Paul was hailed for his performance of playing this aging, beaten-down fighter—a stretch from anything he had done before. Second, the author of the teleplay was A. E. Hotchner, Ernest Hemingway’s biographer, and over time, Paul Newman’s lifelong friend, fishing buddy, and partner in Newman’s Own food empire and philanthropic endeavors. And from this performance, he was offered another role that had been intended for James Dean—the former middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me. This film really marks the beginning of Paul Newman’s movie career. His preparation for the role was intense and something he would repeat each time he started a new movie. He insisted on two weeks rehearsal, at no pay, before every film—a demand rarely requested by other stars. But he believed that “the actor’s got to come to the part;

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the part doesn’t come to the actor.”8 For this movie, it meant training in the gym for hours to build a boxer’s body; learning how to box; sparring with professionals; and most of all, spending time with Graziano himself. Paul explained his method, “When I did Somebody Up There Likes Me, I practically lived with Rocky Graziano in New York for two weeks to prepare.”9 They would meet up at 10 in the morning and keep going until the wee hours of the following day. As good as the reviews were for his performance in Somebody Up There Likes Me, Paul was frustrated that he was constantly being compared to the other leading young male stars of the 1950s, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift. They were being given the parts that Paul wanted: Dean as Cal Trask in East of Eden, Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Clift as John Wickliff Shawnessy in Raintree Country. But those three actors were like supernovas—those rare celestial phenomena that explode, emitting extremely bright light, but are incredibly short lived. Within a decade, Dean was dead at 24, Clift was addicted to drugs and alcohol and eventually died of heart disease, and Brando was a great talent whose work was often overshadowed by his complicated personal life. Paul instead saw himself as both lucky and determined, and that is why his career (and literally his life) extended over so many decades. Paul offered his own comparison to those famous actors. “I always see them [Dean, Clift, Brando] as dogs that are trying to handle bones that are much too big for them, trying to dig up bones under fences when the fences are too deeply embedded. I am lucky to a fault, but I am also very determined. I will somehow get that bone.”10 All of these actors were part of a new generation of Hollywood, no longer content to live within the studio system. When Paul first signed his contract, essentially ceding control of his career to Warner Bros., it was toward the end of that feudal method of controlling actors. At its height, the studio would not only have the power to place an actor in any movie it wanted or lend him out to another studio, but the control extended to the actor’s private life as well, enforcing where he lived, with whom he was seen, limiting any political involvement, and so forth. And the system was definitely stacked financially in the studio’s favor. For example, when Warner Bros. lent Paul Newman out to

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Actor Paul Newman, right, trains with former middleweight champion Tony Zale for their screen roles in the motion picture Somebody Up There Likes Me, in Hollywood, California, January 24, 1956. The film about boxing legend Rocky Graziano starred Paul Newman in the title role while Tony Zale portrayed himself. AP Photo.

MGM for the movie Until They Sail, Paul was paid $1,500 a week, a hefty sum to be sure, but Warner Bros. was being paid $2,500 a week for the loan. Paul Newman was too independent to last long under those circumstances. Hollywood’s idea of a hero was also changing—and that suited Paul Newman, the actor. In the 1930s and 1940s, most heroes were literally the guys in the white hats; the bad guys wore the black hats. Perhaps it wasn’t quite so simple, but the good guys were easy to spot. You had swashbucklers like Errol Flynn in countless pirate movies, or Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan in Boys Town, or John Wayne in innumerable

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westerns. But in the late 1950s, as the studio system was dying, and the world was about to enter the turbulent 1960s, heroes on screen were more complicated. Paul Newman looked like a handsome, blue-eyed Adonis, but the characters he would be playing were more complex, more flawed, much like himself. In 1956, Paul’s personal life was also getting complicated. He was still married to Jackie, and they now had three children, his second daughter, Stephanie, was born in 1956. But he felt trapped in the marriage and, ever since those early meetings in the agent’s office, was increasingly drawn to Joanne Woodward, a rising young actress in her own right. Jackie refused to give Paul a divorce. Perhaps she still loved him, although she was humiliated by his infidelity. But realistically, she also could have rationalized that they had three young children, they had only been married eight years, and frankly, his career was just beginning to take off. She could see that money would no longer be an issue; their homes didn’t have to be rooming houses with shared baths or tiny apartments on Long Island. Financially, they would finally be secure. But when Paul was working in Hollywood, with Jackie back East with the children, he and Joanne were constantly together. Paul felt guilty about the relationship and began drinking heavily. It all came to a head on July 7, 1956, right after the completion of Somebody Up There Likes Me. Driving drunk, he was arrested for running a red light and leaving the scene of an accident. He was taken in handcuffs to the police station. As luck, or lack of it, would have it, the station was filled with reporters and photographers working on a local kidnapping story. Paul’s picture was in the next day’s tabloids. He decided to leave Jackie, whether or not she agreed to a divorce and despite the impact on the children. Paul later commented, “The kids will never completely lose the scars of divorce.”11 Warner Bros. loaned Paul out to Twentieth Century Fox for The Long, Hot Summer, based on the short stories of William Faulkner. His costar was Joanne Woodward. It was the first of their on-screen collaborations. A few years later, in an interview with legendary gossip columnist Louella Parsons, Paul readily admitted that he and Joanne loved working together but also said, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea

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career-wise. I think it detracts from the glamour of an on-screen romance when the audience knows the co-stars are really married.”12 But by 1990, in an interview with the New York Times about their joint movie Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Paul explained why he liked working with Joanne. “You can’t get away with any tricks. You go through a scene, you look at your wife and she goes [Mr. Newman pointed his finger in admonition]. That doesn’t happen, but you do certain things, like [he suddenly held his thumb and forefinger slightly apart]. That means take it down a little bit. There are shorthand things we do.” In the same interview, Joanne added, “Very often you have to work with someone you don’t know, and part of truth on screen is having the truth of a relationship and being comfortable with someone. It’s very hard to manufacture. If you’ve never met someone and you have to be intimate with them, and I don’t just mean sexual intimacy but comfortable touching somebody or interrupting their sentences, and that’s built in if you are married to somebody. All the history you would have to work on is all just there.”13 Again, Paul prepared for the role by spending several days in Clinton, Missouri, soaking up the local atmosphere and perfecting the Southern drawl. His character, Ben Quick, is a good example of the new Hollywood hero. At the beginning of the film, he is amoral, willing to seduce the repressed Clara Varner to get her father’s fortune. But by the end of the movie, the audience sees the humanity in the hero; he has been changed. He’s not perfect, but his flaws are tempered. The reviews for both Paul and Joanne were excellent. Said the New York Times, “Paul Newman is best as the roughneck who moves in with a thinly veiled sneer to knock down the younger generation and make himself the inheritor of the old man . . . Joanne Woodward is also excellent as the independent daughter who snarls not only at the arrogant intruder but likewise at her bluff, uncouth old man.” Paul was given the 1958 Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. By the end of filming The Long, Hot Summer, the situation with Jackie was finally resolved. She obtained a divorce in Mexico, and on January 29, 1958, in Las Vegas, Paul and Joanne were married. Joanne, who collected sherry glasses, received a silver cup as a wedding present from her husband. On it he had inscribed, “So you wound up with Apollo/If he’s sometimes hard to swallow/Use this.”

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Joanne and Paul were in many ways polar opposites. Joanne insisted in a 1979 interview with Good Housekeeping that “Paul and I get along so well because we have nothing in common.” Their friend, novelist Gore Vidal, added, “They are totally different, even in their approaches to acting. Paul worries about his performance; Joanne refuses to prepare.”14 John Foreman, who produced several of the films that starred Paul and Joanne, described them this way: “Joanne is mercurial, quixotic. She speaks her mind, no matter how blunt her remarks might be. Paul is more closed in, quiet, more controlled.”15 Paul loved racing; Joanne was a ballet and opera fan. She worried about the dangers of racing, once quipping, “a mind is a terrible thing

Actors Joanne Woodward, 27, and Paul Newman, 33, are shown after they were married in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 29, 1958. The couple were leaving immediately for New York and a six-week honeymoon abroad. AP Photo.

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to waste on a Trans Am.”16 But she supported his passions, like he supported hers. He would reluctantly accompany her to some events and laughed that when Joanne attended one of his races, “That’ll cost me 10 ballets.”17 He did point out in a 2005 interview with AARP magazine that “Joanne fell out of bed the other night and broke her collarbone. As she lay on the ground, I said to her, ‘I’m not going to listen to any more complaining about my racing!’ ”18 Over their 50-year marriage, there would be more than the usual stresses. Paul’s son, Scott, bitterly resented the divorce and blamed his stepmother. There was a period where he refused to talk to Joanne. Paul’s fame often intruded on family time. It was hard to be married to a “legendary sex symbol,” although as Joanne once remarked, “He’s 44, has six children and snores. How can he be a teen-age sex symbol?”19 Shawn Levy, in his biography Paul Newman: A Life, reports that Paul had at least one extra-marital affair. Paul and Joanne briefly separated in 1969, but Paul was determined not to let his marriage fail, and they quickly reunited. Joyce Haber, a syndicated gossip columnist, wrote an article that said she’d heard “fascinating rumors, so far unchecked” that “the Paul Newmans are living apart, according to friends, and will soon get a divorce.” Joanne and Paul decided to go on the attack, albeit with tongue in cheek. The following day, they took out a half-page ad in the Los Angeles Times that read: (1) RECOGNIZING THE POWER OF THE PRESS– (2) FEARING TO EMBARRASS AN AWESOME JOURNALIST– (3) TERRIFIED TO DISAPPOINT MISS HABER AND HER READERS, WE WILL TRY TO ACCOMMODATE HER “FASCINATING RUMORS, SO FAR UNCHECKED,” BY BUSTING UP OUR MARRIAGE EVEN THOUGH WE STILL LIKE EACH OTHER. JOANNE & PAUL NEWMAN20 While their relationship could often be volatile, Paul insisted that the marriage worked because they had “the correct amounts of lust and respect.” Paul once said, “I’m all in favor of a good screaming free-for-all

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every two or three months. It clears the air, gets rid of old grievances and generally makes for a pleasant relationship.” His next comment was a perfect example of the differences between the husband and wife: “Joanne has a habit of rationalizing, and when she starts that, that’s when I turn ugly! But when she tells me what she instinctively feels, I pay very close attention.”21 Just a few months after their wedding, Joanne won an Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve. She made her own gown, much to the consternation of legendary Hollywood movie star Joan Crawford who sniped, “Joanne Woodward is setting the cause of Hollywood glamour back twenty years by making her own clothes.” Despite her delight in winning, Joanne insisted, “I don’t believe the performance was my best.”22

Paul Newman stars in the motion picture version of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1959. AP Photo.

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They honeymooned in London, but Paul soon had to return to Hollywood to star in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives. The story, changed significantly from Williams’ play, revolves around an explosive Southern family, dominated by the father, Big Daddy, portrayed brilliantly by Burl Ives. Paul played Brick, his troubled, bitter younger son. Elizabeth Taylor was Maggie, Brick’s wife, and the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof, fiery and confused by her husband’s rejection. The movie, which premiered in September 1958, received excellent reviews. Said Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “As a straight exercise in spewing venom and flinging dirty laundry on a line, this fine Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production in color would be hard to beat. It is done by superior talents . . . Mr. Newman . . . gives an ingratiating picture of a tortured and tested young man.”23 Variety, the Hollywood trade publication, called Paul, “one of the finest actors in films, playing cynical underacting against highly developed action. His command of the articulate, sensitive sequences is unmistakable and the way he mirrors his feelings is basic to every scene.”24 Paul received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role, losing to David Niven in Separate Tables. It would be 28 years before he would win the Oscar, but in the coming decade, he played a series of roles that came to define him as an actor.

NOTES 1. Lax, Eric. Newman. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1996, 31. 2. Ibid., 34. 3. Ibid., 35. 4. Oumano, Elena. Paul Newman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, 78. 5. Atkinson, Brooks. “The Guests Came from Jail: Family is Held Captive in ‘Desperate Hours’.” New York Times (February 11, 1955), 20. 6. Lax, Newman, 37. 7. Ibid. 8. Lewis, Richard Warren. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (July 1968), http://www.playboy.com/articles/paul-newman1968-interview/index.html.

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9. Greenberg, Peter S. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (April 1983), http://www.playboy.com/articles/1983-interview-withpaul-newman. 10. Ibid. 11. Lax, Newman, 47. 12. Parsons, Louella O. “We Love Working Together.” Los Angeles Herald Examiner (February 3, 1963), H1, H3. 13. Rother, Larry. “Crossing the Bridges with the Newmans.” New York Times (November 18, 1990), H13. 14. Thomas, Bob. “Paul Newman: His Life Story.” Good Housekeeping (May, 1979), 139. 15. Ibid. 16. “Legendary Actor Paul Newman Dies at 83.” http://www.zap2it. com/celebrities/news/zap-paulnewmanobit,0,5015664.story 17. Thomas, “Paul Newman: His Life Story,” 200. 18. Griffin, Nancy. “Newman’s Luck.” AARP (May & June 2005), http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/newsmakers/info-2005/newmans_ luck/?cq_ck=1273760432759.html. 19. “Quotations.” New York Times (October 19, 1969), E12. 20. Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009, 240. 21. Morella, Joe, and Edward Z. Epstein. Paul and Joanne. New York: Delacorte, 1989, 119. 22. Ibid., 64. 23. Crowther, Bosley. “The Fur Flies in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’.” New York Times (September 19, 1958), 24. 24. “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Variety, http://www.variety.com/review/ VE1117789784.html?categoryid=31&cs=1.

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Chapter 5

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From the moment he signed his contract with Warner Bros., actually even before, Paul was frustrated by the studio system. It was stacked against actors, and while he was making more money than he ever anticipated as an actor, the studio was making even more. In an interview with Playboy, he recalled, “I originally signed a contract with Warners’ at $1,000 a week. By the time I bought out of my contract for $500,000 several years later, they were paying me a princely $17,500 a picture. They would lend me out for $75,000 and take the difference.”1 Even more than the money, however, was the loss of artistic control. He resented the inferior scripts Warner Bros. offered and hated being forced to appear in movies he didn’t deem worthwhile. When Warner Bros. reneged on a deal that let him do an outside project, Paul confronted the head of the studio, Jack Warner. He demanded to be allowed to buy himself out of his contract. Warner refused. Paul then exercised his right to do a Broadway play, but the cost was agreeing to star in The Young Philadelphians, a movie he knew, from the script, would be mediocre at best. In an oral history he gave to Columbia University, Paul explained, “The mistake that you make is, it’s

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bad, and then you work on it like hell, and you walk in, and this scene maybe plays. And because things get better, so much better, you almost mistakenly feel that it’s good—until, of course, you see it, and then it comes back on you with terrible force.”2 But the trade-off, bad movie for a good Broadway play, was worth it. On March 10, 1959, he opened opposite Geraldine Page in another Tennessee Williams work, Sweet Bird of Youth. The reviews were the best he had ever received. According to Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, “In the central roles, the acting is magnificent. Geraldine Page gives a fabulous performance as the decaying movie queen . . . And Paul Newman’s young man is the perfect companion-piece. Although he has a braggart, calculating exterior, he is as immature as an adolescent; brassy outside, terrified and remorseful when he stops strutting.”3 One month later, on April 8, 1959, Joanne gave birth to their first daughter, Elinor Theresa, named for her grandmothers. Her nickname was Nell Potts, and she used it when, as a child, she acted with her mother in two movies directed by her father. Paul’s new agent, Lew Wasserman, also from Cleveland, was head of MCA, the largest talent agency in the business. He was, Paul said with humor but respect, “a master charlatan.” Wasserman knew what Paul was worth on the open market and proposed that the actor offer to buy his way out of the contract for $500,000. Paul wanted out but worried that he couldn’t afford it: “I’ll be working for twenty years to pay that off.” Wasserman insisted that he could make the deal and it would be worth it.4 At the end of the play’s run, Paul was to return to Warner Bros. According to Paul, Wasserman “waited until Jack Warner was in a terrible humor about something, and Warner said, ‘Now this moron Newman is coming back, and he’s going to be a pain in the butt.’ And Wasserman said, ‘Why do you have to put up with that stuff? Let the guy buy his way out. He’s not going to amount to anything.’ Warner bought it, and that was the end of that.” In August 1959, Paul Newman bought his freedom for a half-million dollars. While he panicked that he would be in debt for 20 years, he later admitted that it took him less than a year to pay it off and the investment in his future would show a profit in the next decade.5

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In the 1960s, he starred in three films that garnered him Oscar nominations and several others that catapulted him to superstar status. In 1961, Paul starred in The Hustler, playing the hero of the film who was not particularly likeable. He was “Fast Eddie” Felson, a pool hustler determined to be the best player in the country. To do that he had to beat the legendary “Minnesota Fats” (played by Jackie Gleason). Both Paul and Jackie Gleason were coached by the greatest pool player of the era, Willie Mosconi. Paul kept a pool table in his living room during the filming of the movie so he could continue to practice. Eddie Felson is determined to succeed, no matter what the price. He has his thumbs broken by thugs; discards old friends because they won’t support his dream; and eventually loses Sarah, his lover, because, as she points out, he insists on living in a world where the inhabitants are “perverted, twisted and crippled.” By the end of the movie, Fast Eddie has beaten Minnesota Fats, but no one is cheering for the winner. His values aren’t the values of the audience. As film historian Ethan Mordden explains, “Newman’s hustler is an underdog loser, with the blind, destructive self-love of the jerk who sees himself as a hero.” The Hustler redefined the relationship of films to their audience. It is “one of challenge rather than flattery, of doubt rather than certainty.” Mordden points out that unlike the films of the 1950s, The Hustler takes “a brutal, clear look at the ego-affirmation of the one-on-one contest, at the inhumanity of the winner or the castrated vulnerability of the loser.”6 The Hustler was voted one of the top-10 movies by the New York Times and Time magazine. Paul received great reviews. Years later, Roger Ebert in a 2002 review said, “Among the male faces in the movie, most of them old, weathered, cold or cruel, Paul Newman’s open and handsome looks are a contrast. But the casting is correct. He isn’t too handsome for this ugly world, but a hustler who trades on his boyish grin and aw-shucks way of asking if anybody feels like a game. His face has gotten Eddie almost as far as his pool skills. He doesn’t look like a hustler, but then the best ones never do.”7 It’s a description that could apply to the actor as well. His good looks certainly are an important part of Paul’s popular appeal—but he has the goods to deliver and he does. Paul was nominated for another Academy Award but lost to Maximilian Schell for Judgment at Nuremberg.

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In that same year, on September 27, 1961, the second daughter of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward was born. She was Melissa Steward Newman, nicknamed Lissy. In 1962, Joanne and Paul bought their Westport, Connecticut, home. They made a conscious decision to leave the show-business town of Hollywood and raise their family in a suburban setting. They eventually bought an apartment in New York City and would rent houses in California when filming. But home, which they named Nook House, was an 18th-century farmhouse and two barns on a sprawling, private estate next to the Aspetuck River. It was here that Paul Newman chose to spend his final days. In 1963, he starred in Hud, or as the ads would tout, Paul Newman is Hud . . . The man with the barbed wire soul. The movie poster featured Paul, clad in tight blue jeans, his blue eyes glinting. Once again he prepared meticulously for the role, working on a ranch in Texas, sleeping in a bunkhouse for 10 days, roping steers, mending fences. He approached each new part with a plan: “If I feel that a character is close to me, my homework is minimal. I’m great at writing voluminous notes to myself on the back of a script. It all breaks down to the way the character walks or uses his hands, his motions and his movements. I think that once you get the physical quality of a character, the inner person comes by itself.”8 According to movie critic Roger Ebert, this movie, along with The Hustler, Harper, Hombre, and eventually Cool Hand Luke, marks a change in the kind of films Paul would make—and the kind of hero, or antihero, that the American public craved. Ebert traces the concept of the antihero from the early 1950s, before Paul had made his first movie. Those early antiheroes didn’t want “your sympathy or understanding.” Like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire or in The Wild One, this hero rejected the values of the audience. According to Ebert, “Newman used to be just another good-looking movie star. But he went through a gradual shift in image, starting with Exodus . . . a troublemaker, a malcontent, a loner . . . That’s the kind of guy he played in all those movies beginning with H (The Hustler, Hud, Harper, Hombre). He smiled at the idiots who were crossing him. He didn’t care what people thought. And a subtle change took place. The hero stopped wanting to be a hero.”9

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Hud Bannon is amoral, alienates both his father and the nephew that idolizes him, brutally attacks the housekeeper, and is willing to sell diseased cattle to make a quick buck. There is nothing redeeming about him. Film historian Ethan Mordden points out, “Here is Newman, really, beating out [Warren] Beatty and [Robert] Redford as the era’s dark lord through force of meaness.”10 Toni Mastroianni wrote in the Cleveland Press, “[Hud] has no hero whom you can admire, no philosophy in which you can find comfort. It reflects with brutal honesty much that is wrong with society.”11 The New York Times was lavish in its praise, “Paul Newman is tremendous—a potent, voracious man, restless with all his crude ambitions, arrogant with his contempt and churned up inside with all the meanness and misgivings about himself.”12 And yet, to Paul’s surprise, audiences adored this character, as he explained, “Hud backfired. We thought the last thing people would do was accept Hud as a heroic character. After all, Hud is amoral, greedy, self-centered, selfish, in it for what he can get at the expense of the community. We thought we could give him the external graces: a hot-shot with the women, a good drinker, brave in his profession, a good barroom brawler. But morally, he’s an empty suit. We thought that the audience would be unnerved by that and might be taught by that. But kids thought he was terrific! His amorality just went right over their heads; all they saw was this Western, heroic individual.”13 And in Hud, Paul Newman had become a full-fledged sex symbol. He described his experience with female fans. “The first time I remember women reacting to me was when we were filming Hud in Texas. Women were literally trying to climb through the transoms at the motel where I stayed. At first, it’s flattering to the ego. At first. Then you realize that they’re mixing me up with the roles I play—characters created by writers who have nothing to do with who I am.” Paul became incensed that even professional movie critics missed the point about Hud: “One review I’ll never forget: It said that Hud was quite a marvelous picture. ‘The only problem,’ the reviewer wrote, ‘is that Paul Newman is playing the part, because basically, he has a face that doesn’t look lived in.’ But Jesus Christ, that’s exactly what made the bastard dangerous. The whole point of the character is that he has a face that doesn’t look lived

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in. How could he have missed the whole point to such an extraordinary degree? At that exact moment, I realized I should stop reading reviews. And I haven’t read one since. Critics don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, anyway. You get a big fat head if reviews are good and you go into fits of depression if they’re bad. Who needs either?”14 Paul was again nominated for an Oscar but lost to Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. Losing the top award yet again seemed to be a pattern. Paul would laugh when asked by the press if it bothered him that Joanne had won an Oscar and he was the perpetual bridesmaid, never the bride. He offered this scenario that he thought would be fun. “I’d like to win about 69 nominations—I think that’s an interesting number—and at the age of 90, crawl on my hands and knees, ridden with arthritis, to pick up an Oscar. That would be kind of stylish. It’s nice to be nominated, but I don’t think my life will be incomplete if I never win an Oscar.”15 After Hud, Paul did five films in five years, none of them as good as that groundbreaking movie. On April 21, 1965, he also became a father for the sixth time; Claire Olivia Newman was born, nicknamed Clea. It was reported in Time magazine the following week that it had been a natural birth, “which left mother able to enjoy two peanut-butter sandwiches half an hour after delivery.” Joanne Woodward once commented, “My husband takes pride in being a father of six children and having never changed a diaper.”16 Many years later, Joanne mused about her parenting responsibilities and its effect on her career. Once the children were born, her acting roles became fewer and farther between. Joanne said, “As I look back, I think what I really wanted was to have a life with no children, but I was raised in a generation that taught us otherwise. I felt very torn at times, lured away by the satisfaction of acting, which is a worthy thing, and by my sense of ambition, which isn’t. Acclaim is the false aspect of the job, which screws you up. You start to need it, like a drug, and in the final analysis, what does it all mean? I won my Academy Award when I was very young, and it was exciting for five or ten minutes. Sitting in bed afterward and drinking my Ovaltine, I said to Paul, ‘Is that it?’ Now I think being a full-time parent would be O.K. with me. With what I’ve learned, I’d enjoy it a lot more.”17 In 1966, Paul starred in Harper, a dark mystery that grabbed the public’s attention, although the critics were less kind. It was based on Ross

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Macdonald’s series. Macdonald’s detective was named Lew Archer, but trying to play off the H success of The Hustler and Hud, the detective and the movie became Harper. Paul would play Lew Harper, a broken-down, cynical detective, hired to find a rich woman’s missing husband. It costarred Lauren Bacall, the widow of Humphrey Bogart who had played that same type of character in countless movies in the 1940s and 1950s. The comparison to screen legend Bogey, just like the comparison made earlier in his career to Marlon Brando, ignored the strength of Paul Newman, the actor. Again, Paul’s good looks were seen as a detriment. Said Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “Mr. Newman is an interesting actor. He can be cynical, casual, cruel and can convey an air of personal anguish that is appropriate to his noncommitted role. But he is too fresh, too ruggedly good looking to be consistent as the sort of beat-up slob that his shady detective is intended to be and as Mr. Bogart used to be.”18 But the public loved Harper, and it put Paul Newman back on the top-10 list of box-office stars of the year. From film noir to cold war espionage, Paul wanted to do his next movie, Torn Curtain, in order to work with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. His costar was Julie Andrews, post Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. Hitchcock was notoriously difficult and certainly not interested in any collaboration with one of his actors. Paul had questions about the script and his character and wrote a detailed memo to the director. Peter Bogdanovich, in an article for the New York Times, describes the famed director’s furious response: “What was the matter, I asked. ‘Paul Newman sent me a memo,’ he said acidly, as if it might as well have been a letter bomb. A memo about what? ‘The script!’ He was indignant. The four-page missive had evidently dealt with Newman’s questions, misgivings, and complaints about various aspects of the screenplay and how these would affect his character. ‘His character!’ Hitch muttered under his breath. ‘I just thought to myself, What does it matter about your character? It’s just going to be Paul Newman anyway.’ ”19 Paul had to skip his preferred rehearsal period because he’d been in a terrible motorcycle accident, requiring skin grafts on his left hand. He was still recovering when filming began. While Paul insisted that Hitchcock had treated him with respect, the famed director, whether

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making a joke to spark some publicity for the film, or speaking the truth, said in a New York Times interview, when asked about any troubles he had encountered filming Torn Curtain, “I always say that the most difficult things to photograph are dogs, babies, motorboats, Charles Laughton (God rest his soul) and Method actors.”20 Paul, the consummate Method actor, was apparently not offended. In any case, the movie was a commercial and critical failure. In 1967, Paul appeared in two movies. The first was Hombre, a western in which he plays a white man raised by the Indians. In his review, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, “By now we know the role Paul Newman will play . . . since he’s Hombre and that means he’s in the tradition of Hud, The Hustler and Harper. He’ll be taciturn and alienated and tough, but victimized by a lot of wishy-washy liberals.”21 The movie did well but was eclipsed later in the year when Cool Hand Luke was released. It’s hard to give a simple synopsis of Cool Hand Luke. A convict refuses to conform to chain-gang life doesn’t do it justice. It’s a drama, with laugh-out-loud humor and memorable lines that have been repeated for decades. The American Film Institute voted the movie’s “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” as the number 11 movie quote. Paul Newman plays Luke Jackson, arrested for unscrewing the tops of parking meters while on a drunken spree. He’s sentenced to two years of labor on a chain gang. Luke refuses to break even when treated brutally by cruel guards. He earns the respect of fellow prisoners. His repeated attempts to escape fail, and he is beaten by sadistic guards until he begs for mercy. His final escape ends in his death, but the legend of Cool Hand Luke lives on among the prisoners. The reviews were fantastic. Bosley Crowther said in the New York Times, “Mr. Newman is excellent, at the top of his sometime erratic form, in the role of this warped and alienated loner whose destiny it is to lose.”22 Roger Ebert insisted, “Luke is the first Newman character to understand himself well enough to tell us to shove off. He’s through risking his neck to make us happy. With this film, Newman completes a cycle of five films over six years, and together they have something to say about the current status of heroism. Whether this was anyone’s

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original intention is doubtful. But ‘Cool Hand Luke’ does draw together threads from the earlier movies, especially ‘Hombre,’ and it is a tough, honest film with backbone.”23 Paul was again nominated for an Oscar but lost to Rod Steiger for his performance in In the Heat of the Night. Celebrity bothers Paul and his family. He begins wearing dark glasses whenever he’s out, in hopes of avoiding being recognized. His children resent the constant intrusion of fans. He institutes a new rule—no more autographs. He explained, “I can tell you when I stopped. I was standing at a urinal at Sardi’s [a famous show business restaurant] in New York and a guy came through the door with a piece of paper and a pen in his hand. Since that moment, I’ve thought about the foolishness of it and the indecency of it and realized there was no situation that could not be violated. Thinking back on that moment, I wonder, What do I do with my hands? Do I wash them first and then shake hands? Or do I shake hands and then wash up?”24 So what did he owe his fans? “Sure, I owe them a lot. I owe them the best performance I can give; I owe them an appearance on my set exactly on time: I owe them trying to work for the best I can, not just for money. But if somebody says that what I owe him is to stand up against a wall and take off my dark glasses so he can take a picture of my baby blues, then I say, ‘No, I don’t owe you that.’ I try not to be hurtful. I say something like, ‘If I take off my glasses, my pants will fall down.’ Or, if they’re insistent, I say, ‘Sure, I’ll take off my dark glasses if you’ll let me look at your gums . . . The blue eye stuff is offensive because of the implication that you’d be a failure if you didn’t have them.’ ”25 He once remarked, “If I died today, they might write on my tombstone, ‘Here lies Paul Newman, died at age forty-three, a failure because his eyes turned brown.’ ”26

NOTES 1. Lewis, Richard Warren. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (July 1968) http://www.playboy.com/articles/paul-newman-1968interview/index.html. 2. Newman, Paul. Interview with Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York, June 1959.

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3. Atkinson, Brooks. “Portrait of Corruption.” New York Times (March 11, 1959), 39. 4. Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009, 139. 5. Hirschberg, Lynn. “Has Paul Newman Finally Grown Up?” New York (December 12, 1994), 37–45. 6. Mordden, Ethan. Medium Cool. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 58, 28, 29. 7. Ebert, Roger. “The Hustler.” Chicago Sun-Times (June 23, 2002), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020623/ REVIEWS08/206230301/1023. 8. Lewis, “Playboy Interview.” 9. Ebert, Roger. “Cool Hand Luke.” Chicago Sun-Times (December 3, 1967), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID= /19671203/REVIEWS/712030301/1023. 10. Mordden, Medium Cool, 60. 11. Mastroianni, Toni. “Hud.” Cleveland Press (June 8, 1963), http:// www.clevelandmemory.org/mastroianni/tm529.shtml. 12. Crowther, Bosley. “ ‘Hud’ Chronicles a Selfish, Snarling Heel.” New York Times (May 29, 1963), 26. 13. Greenberg, “Playboy Interview.” 14. Lewis, “Playboy Interview,.” 15. Ibid. 16. Morella, Joe, and Edward Z. Epstein. Paul and Joanne. New York: Delacorte, 1989, 113. 17. Worrell, Denise, John Skow, and Elaine Dutka. “Paul Newman: Verdict on a Superstar.” Time (December 6, 1982), http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,923114,00.html. 18. Crowther, Bosley. “Paul Newman in ‘Harper’ Evokes Bogart.” New York Times (March 31, 1966), 43. 19. Bogdanovich, Peter. “Is That Ticking (Pause) a Bomb?” New York Times (April 11, 1999), AR15 20. Canby, Vincent. “Hitchcock on Job Selling Film.” New York Times (July 7, 1966), 30. 21. Ebert, Roger. “Hombre.” Chicago Sun-Times (April 21, 1967), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19670421/ REVIEWS/704210301.

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22. Crowther, Bosley. “Forceful Portrait of a Man Born to Lose.” New York Times (November 2, 1967), 58. 23. Ebert, “Cool Hand Luke.” 24. Greenberg, “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” 25. Ibid. 26. Lewis, “Playboy Interview.”

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Chapter 6

ROARING TO THE FINISH LINE

Race-car analyst Gregg Leary asked the question, “Was Paul Newman an actor who raced—or a racer who acted?” Leary is convinced that Paul would prefer the latter.1 Paul, or as he was known at the racetrack, PL, didn’t begin his racing career until he was 47. As he confessed, “I always liked fast cars, Corvettes and stuff like that, but I was never interested in racing until I made that damn movie.”2 The movie was Winning, released in 1969, the story of Frank Capua, a race-car driver who dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500. It costarred Joanne Woodward, his wife on screen and off; Robert Wagner as his rival both on the track and with his wife; and Richard Thomas, as the adopted stepson who idolizes Frank. The movie combined a love-story triangle with action sequences on the track—and it was Paul’s first brush with the world of high-speed driving. In preparation for the movie, Paul attended the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving. Bondurant, a former race-car driver himself, had only three days to get the movie star ready for the shoot. Despite the short rehearsal time, Paul ended up doing many of

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the racing scenes himself instead of using a stunt double. As he described to Sam Posey in a 1980 Sports Illustrated article, “I wound up going from the two-liter Datsun road car used in the school to a CanAm-type car with over 500 horsepower used in the movie, at which point it stopped being a matter of learning and became a question of trying to survive. I found I had enjoyed the precision of it, of controlling those cars.”3 He was hooked. For years, Paul had souped up his VW Rabbit with a Porsche engine. He owned three motorcycles until 1965, when his Triumph hit a slick spot and he was thrown. At the last minute, Newman’s luck held. He managed to get his hands out to break his fall—saving the gorgeous face, but with serious injuries to his legs and left hand. After the accident, he sold his motorcycles. Given the demands of his movie commitments, it took Paul three years to get his racing license. But after that he never took an acting job between April and September, which is racing season. He committed himself to the world of speed. He said, “I’ve always been very competitive. I played bad football, I played bad baseball, and I played bad tennis. I had the suicide crouch in skiing. I was pretty good on skates, but my stickwork was terrible. I was even a lousy dancer, unless we stayed with the box step . . . I’ve thought about those things, and I’ve realized that the only time I’ve felt physically graceful was in a race car.”4 At first, he thought he could use the Corvette he already owned. Bob Sharp, who owned a Datsun dealership in nearby Wilton, Connecticut, and was himself a six-time winner of Sports Car Club of America national championships, took Paul and his Corvette out to the track. But Paul quickly discovered that a sports car, even one that could go 205 miles per hour, is not constructed to be a race car. Their tires fold under, brakes get hot, and engines overheat. Paul knew he needed a different car, and Sharp put him in a Datsun 510. He practiced at Lime Rock, Connecticut, about 80 miles from his home in Westport. He usually arrived by helicopter. There was no Hollywood entourage; he hung out with the other drivers and the mechanics. His drove the Datsun 510 very smoothly, but also very slowly. If he was going to be a contender, he would have to pick up speed. Paul was perfectly aware that other racers didn’t think he had much of a

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chance to make it as a pro, because of his age (he was already 47), his slow speed, and his measured approach to learning the craft of race-car driving. He likened the process he followed to become a race-car driver to that of becoming an actor: “I’m a slow study. I knew that before I started. When I was learning to act it took months of watching the others at the Actors Studio before I began to get anywhere. But I’m not dumb, and when I got the car I was determined to learn my craft at what speed seemed sensible.”5 And just as he listened to the directors of his movies, Paul was more than willing to take driving and car advice from the pros at the track. Paul described his steady development as an accomplished driver: “At first, I drove with a balloon foot, until I learned better.” A balloon foot, unlike a lead foot, means the driver is too light on the accelerator. In the beginning, he found that if he pressed too hard on the accelerator, he lost control. Paul explained, “It was a matter of developing experience and confidence, and understanding what you can do and what the car can do.”6 What he wasn’t willing to do was become part of what Bob Sharp conceived as a huge public relations bonanza for Datsun. Sharp wanted to add Paul to his team of drivers—and that would inevitably have meant more money from Datsun and an opportunity for Sharp to move into a bigger racing arena. Paul steadfastly refused. Sharp said, “He told me he would lease a car and pay us to maintain it, but he didn’t want to be considered part of a team, and he wouldn’t endorse any of my sponsors.”7 Paul drove for a season, then missed the next one because he was filming The Towering Inferno. He made up his mind that he would never miss another racing season—and would only accept roles that would be filmed in the winter, racing’s off-season. Race-car analyst Sam Posey believed that Paul used many of the same techniques that made him a good actor in his quest to become a winning race-car driver: he had a terrific sense of timing (needed to deliver lines and emotions on cue), and he had an incredible ability to concentrate, shutting out everything extraneous and focusing on the task at hand. One major drawback in the beginning of Paul’s racing career was that he didn’t actually know very much about the minute adjustments

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that would transform a good car to a great one. He leaned heavily on Bob Sharp to handle those mechanics. As Paul improved and got faster, he moved from the regional races to the national ones, competing directly against Sharp on the track and always coming in third or fourth. There was gossip, Posey insists unfounded, that Sharp wasn’t fine-tuning Paul’s car as much as he should have because he didn’t want to lose to the Hollywood actor turned race-car driver. Paul waved off the innuendos. He came from Hollywood where gossip was a professional sport. He told Posey, “There’s probably as much bull in racing as there is in Hollywood, which is really saying something. The difference is that in racing no one really takes it seriously. To me, that makes racing fun, and for the most part, I enjoy the people in racing a lot more than the people in Hollywood.”8 There were also those who suggested that Paul received special advantages. Peter Slater, vice president of Bob Sharp racing, discounted the notion, saying, “when Paul was developing as a driver, he was losing with the same equipment that others had. And he’s winning with virtually the same. The difference is in the driver [Paul].”9 Nonetheless, in 1976, Paul decided to make a change. He bought a Triumph TR-6 from Bob Tullius, who ran a team backed by British Leyland. The car had won the national championship the year before. Tullius would provide the technical help that Paul still needed. Quickly, Paul adjusted to the speed of the new car and then decided to form his own team. That year, he won his first national championship. While exhilarating, Paul and the other professionals knew that he had been lucky, winning primarily because other faster cars fell out. Still, a win is a win. But what Paul had not counted on was how demanding it would be to run a racing team. He was still a full-time actor with a wife and six kids, and so the team disintegrated. Around the same time, Bob Sharp retired from racing, although he still ran a team. He decided to offer one of his racing slots to Paul. Sharp understood that something had changed in Paul. “Winning the national championship, even if there had been a lot of luck involved, had given him some self-confidence as a driver, and as a result he was willing to let us use him for promotions and certain types of publicity,” said Sharp.

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But this couldn’t just be a publicity stunt. If Paul couldn’t deliver the goods on the track, blue eyes or not, he would be fired from Sharp’s team. That year, he was to campaign a 160 mph Datsun 280Z and a sedan-bodied Datsun 200 SX. Sam Posey was at Lime Rock on the day Paul was to test-drive the two cars. He described the course: Driving a car at Lime Rock, a track which has fast corners and a rough surface, is like taking a speedboat through a turn over choppy water. The toughest corner comes at the end of the straight, where the road bends into a fast 180-degree righthand sweeper, taken at about 95 mph, then tightens back on itself before a series of tight esses. The pavement has been frost-heaved into several small wave-like ridges that run diagonally across the track in the sweeper, and as it crosses these ridges a car is crushed down on its suspension one instant and is nearly airborne the next. Menacing trees and an earth bank flank a narrow runoff space to the outside. The turn is a sort of litmus test for drivers—they are either fast or slow and any spectator can see it immediately. Paul was fast. What is more, he was fast in both cars long before he was really familiar with them, which is the indication of a driver with a good sense of balance, not to mention a large dose of exuberance. In the pits, the mood of the team was jubilant. We realized this was not just a warmed-up version of the slow and steady Newman of the early days: he had made a quantum leap in speed.10 Paul discovered that he liked the car best when it was sliding the most—a sign of a confident racer. It also meant that he would get even faster with practice on these new cars. He started off the Northeast Division Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) season with a phenomenal 8 wins in 13 races. Sometimes he would be a little too cautious, giving up the lead when pressured by other drivers. He was still getting used to being the guy to beat—but he was learning fast. What amazed other drivers and the pit crew was how much he excelled when driving in the rain. It took talent and guts—and Paul had enough of both. Unfortunately, when Paul went to the national championships that year at Road Atlanta, he got a bad case of stage fright. He was honest

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about his feelings. Paul admitted, “Sure I get nervous before a race. Who doesn’t? It begins about 15 minutes before the start, a minor case of the shakes while I’m sitting there in the car. It’s not from fear of being hurt, it’s that I’m afraid I won’t give a good performance. I get the same feeling when I’m waiting backstage for the curtain to go up.”11 He lost every race. Despite the disappointment at Road Atlanta, Paul decided he wanted to broaden his involvement in the sport. He decided to become part owner of a team running the Cam-Am series and hired two top drivers, Elliott Forbes-Robinson and Keke Rosberg. His team got backing from Budweiser and quickly became the leaders in the series. The following year, Paul challenged himself again. In addition to driving the Datsuns, he decided to drive a Porsche 935 in the 24-hour endurance races at Daytona and Le Mans. He was now 53 years old and a realist. He told Sam Posey, “I’ve thought a lot about the chances of getting hurt in racing. I’m not one of those people who just puts it out of his mind. I know the average guy can go to the office with a broken leg and on crutches, but there’s simply no way I can get in front of those cameras if there’s anything wrong.”12 Still he was determined to try endurance racing. At Daytona, his car broke down and he was out. Le Mans, in France, is the world’s oldest sports-car endurance race, held annually since 1923. It’s also known as the Grand Prix of Endurance. Paul teamed with Dick Barbour, who owned the car, and German driver Rolf Stommelen. At one point in the race, it started to rain, which added to the usual dangers of racing because at Le Mans the racetrack surface doesn’t drain well. Think about what it must be like to be driving 200 miles per hour when your car begins to hydroplane, literally skimming across the water, and it seems like forever before your tires again grip the road. But Paul was experienced and even seemed to enjoy racing in rain. The Newman-Barbour-Stommelen team came in second. Unlike the staid Oscars, Paul stood on the podium spraying champagne across the crowd. It was an exhilarating moment for this newcomer to racing. When he returned to SCCA Northeast races, he was on a hot streak, winning 8 races in a row. But at Road Atlanta that year, despite all the

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successes of the previous months, he lost, coming in third but without the bravado and skill that he had been exhibiting. Racing took on a whole new dimension in late 1982. Carl Haas, a legendary racing-car sponsor and the U.S. distributor for Lola cars and Hewland gearboxes, called Paul and asked if he would like to race at Indianapolis, the premier American racetrack. In an interview with Gordon Kirby, Paul explained, “Smoke started coming out of my ears. I said, ‘Are you nuts? I shouldn’t even be listening to this invitation.’ ”13 The two formed Newman/Haas, one of the most successful and longestlasting racing teams. Since 1983, Newman/Haas (now Newman/Haas/ Lanigan), has won 107 Indy car races. Their drivers are a who’s who of the most famous names in the business, including Mario Andretti. Paul had a bitter break with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1996 when Tony George, the IMS chief, split American open-wheel racing by forming the Indy Racing League. Paul was a fierce supporter of Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) and later Champ Car Open Wheel Racing Series. He refused to go to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway until 2007, and only then to accept money for Newman’s Own Foundation. Before he died, the two groups reunited. Paul was relieved and believed it was necessary for the sport. At the 2008 Pole Day at the Speedway, a few months before his death, he reminisced about the old days: “It’s good to be back at Indianapolis. It brings back a lot of fond memories. We’ve won eight championships and come in second twice here at Indianapolis, but we’ve never won the 500. It’s wonderful to be running against Roger Penske and Bobby Rahal and Michael Andretti and all those guys. It’s comfortable. My favorite Indy 500 tradition was that it took a whole month. Indy started at the first of May, and you had to have your reservation in at the speedway motel. If you wanted [the room] for two days, you took it for the whole month or you wouldn’t get it.”14 Until his final illness, Paul continued to attend most CART or Champ Car races. He made his last start in an endurance race at the Rolex 24 at Daytona Speedway when he was 81 years old. In a 2004 interview with Champ Car Magazine, Paul said, “Acting is a lot like racing. It’s the same type of discipline—one and only one person to

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depend on in your work, on the track or on the stage. Actually you need a good team around you in both careers.”15

NOTES 1. Leary, Gregg. “Paul Newman Crossed the Finish Line.” Speedtv. com (September 27, 2008), http://www.speedtv.com/wiki/Paul-New man-Crossed-the-Finish-Line/. 2. Posey, Sam. “The Perils of Paul.” Sports Illustrated (August 25, 1980), http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG 1123713/index.htm. 3. Ibid. 4. Berkow, Ira. “Role of Racer Satisfies Newman’s Competitive Side,” New York Times (December 23, 1985), http://www.nytimes.com/ 1985/12/23/sports/role-of-racer-satisfies-newman-s-competitive-side. html. 5. Posey, “The Perils of Paul.” 6. Berkow, “Role of Racer Satisfies Newman’s Competitive Side.” 7. Posey, “The Perils of Paul.” 8. Oreovicz, John. “Newman a Lot of Things, but for Many Years, Racing Came First.” ESPN.com (September 28, 2008), http://sports. espn.go.com/espn/print?id=3612479&type=story. 9. Berkow, “Role of Racer Satisfies Newman’s Competitive Side.” 10. Posey, “The Perils of Paul.” 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Oreovicz, “Newman a Lot of Things.” 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid.

Chapter 7

TAKING ON NEW CHALLENGES

The direction of Paul Newman’s life took several unusual, and at times tragic, twists and turns in the years that followed the huge success of Cool Hand Luke. He met each challenge head-on, and that terrier-like personality that he used to describe himself was an important reason why he succeeded when it would have been easy to fail, and why he survived when it would have been understandable to have withdrawn and faded away. In 1968, Paul Newman the actor became Paul Newman the featurefilm director. A few years earlier, he had directed a short film (and lost $22,000 on the project). Nonetheless, he described it as “the best creative experience I’ve ever had. I was just absolutely alive.” The concept of directing was intriguing, as he explained, “If you were a painter and you were allowed only one quarter of the canvas, it would be a disappointment. Why merely be a first violinist if you feel you can conduct.”1 He came to Rachel, Rachel, circuitously. He had formed a production company with John Foreman, who had previously been Joanne’s agent. Foreman had read A Jest of God by the Canadian writer Margaret

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Laurence and passed it on to Joanne. The story focused on a 35-yearold spinster schoolteacher living with her mother above a funeral parlor. They optioned the book despite the fact that Paul didn’t think it was movie material. Joanne hired Stewart Stern, who had written the screenplay for Rebel without a Cause, to transform the book into a script. Joanne hadn’t done many movies since starting a family. She explained, “People kept asking, ‘Whatever happened to Joanne Woodward?’ Well, she got bored waiting around [for good projects]. That’s why I was attracted to Rachel, Rachel. Its theme is that things never stop, tomorrow is another day. I felt very unhappy and discouraged and I felt my career had ended . . . I was determined I’d rather do nothing than just work for the sake of having a job, and I was even more determined I’d never do anything again unless I felt strongly about it.”2 Although Joanne was firmly committed to making Rachel, Rachel, that wasn’t nearly enough in Hollywood. In a New York Times interview, Joanne was blunt about what happened next: “Paul had no intention of directing it, but we couldn’t get anyone else interested. Stewart Stern and I went around offering ourselves to everybody but I’m afraid offering a package of the script and me was hardly like offering Elizabeth Taylor and Tennessee Williams.”3 Even after Paul signed on to direct, the studios were hesitant to fund the project. Finally, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts committed $700,000, but with a huge proviso: Paul and Joanne had to pay for any overrun. Furthermore, Paul had to do two movies for the studio at half his regular fee, and Joanne was obligated to do one. The movie starred Joanne (as Rachel) and Estelle Parsons, who had won the best supporting actress Oscar for Bonnie and Clyde. Paul and Joanne’s daughter, 9-year-old Nell, was also in the movie, playing Rachel as a young girl. Art Newman Jr., Paul’s older brother, was an associate producer. The movie was shot in a gymnasium in Danbury, Connecticut, less than an hour from the Newman-Woodward home. In an interview with Roger Ebert in Esquire, Paul discussed his concept for the movie. Although he used flashbacks and fantasies, he wanted simplicity. As he said, “In my perversity, I tried to keep the direction invisible in Rachel. I never tried to increase the emotion with

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technical tricks.” He believed that movie-making had sacrificed technical bravado over story-telling. “You get these technically oriented sets and every shot is set up for the convenience of the technicians. And you [the actor] get your motor running and have to stop while they move around some lights or rub a piece of tissue across your nose. Aargh!”4 He was more explicit about his directing choices and where he drew his inspiration in an interview with the English newspaper, the Times. He denied being worried about the technical aspects of his first directing experience: “Well I do know a bit about [camera] lenses. I didn’t want the film to be tricky. The function of the camera was simply to eavesdrop. I made it a rule that the actor would never have to go to the camera . . . the camera would always come to him. It was rather like the old days of live television.”5 Like so many other aspects of his life, Paul relished a challenge. As he told Playboy, “You have to understand that I have that kind of personality. I just say, why not? Why not get into salad dressing. Why not race? Directing allowed me to be in control of the entire canvas, rather than just one small part. Also, I was curious to find out if I could direct.”6 As he explained to the Times, directing Rachel, Rachel was almost inevitable: “I had some ideas about the book [on which the movie is based] and the structuring of it and there were a few conflicting discussions between myself and the writer . . . until I gradually realized I just had to direct it. It was the only way to settle the conflicts we had been having! But it would have happened sooner or later anyway— I did in fact major in direction at Yale.”7 The movie ended up costing less than $800,000 (as a comparison, Avatar is estimated to have cost at least $230 million, and perhaps as much as $500 million). Box-office revenues for Rachel, Rachel were $8 million. Even better, the reviews were wonderful. The New York Times called it, “The best written, most seriously acted American movie in a long time.”8 Life magazine called the new director, “anything but the bouncing boy-o we are accustomed to seeing on our screens . . . He has a sensitive, slightly melancholic eye for something most American movies miss—the texture of ordinary life. He displays, moreover, a feel for emotional nuance and a technical sureness; he is neither too radical nor too conservative. That is remarkable in a first film.”9

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Rachel, Rachel was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress in a Leading Role. Paul won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for directing, while the group awarded Joanne the prize for Best Actress. Years later, before he had won an Oscar, he was slightly bitter when thinking about the awards season for Rachel, Rachel. Paul pointed out, “Well, it was pretty hard to win the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best director for that film and then not even get nominated for the Oscar. But I’m not gonna whine about it.”10 But he admitted to taking a perverse pleasure in the movie’s success. As Paul explained, “I’m not a particularly vindictive man but I must say I now read the letters of rejection I got for the film with a certain quiet pleasure. There is, shall we say, a good deal of inward chuckling.”11 Paul helmed five more films over the next 20 years. In 1970, besides directing, he also starred in Sometimes a Great Notion. He often chose Joanne to star in the films he directed, including The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), The Shadow Box (1980, a TV movie), and The Glass Menagerie (1987). In Harry & Son (1984), Paul wore three hats: director, star, and screenwriter. In 1969, he appeared in the first of two buddy movies with Robert Redford: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was based on the real-life adventures of bank robbers Robert Leroy Parker, aka Butch Cassidy, and Harry Longabaugh, aka Sundance, and their Hole in the Wall gang. Actually, the real gang was called the Wild Bunch, but since there had been a recent movie with that name, Hollywood dictated a name change for Butch’s gang. Although it’s hard to imagine anyone else as Butch and Sundance, in fact, several other Hollywood stars were considered for the parts. Dustin Hoffman, fresh from The Graduate and before Midnight Cowboy, was on the short list for the role of Butch. Steve McQueen, who had just appeared in The Thomas Crown Affair, was set to play Sundance but withdrew over billing disagreements. Warren Beatty didn’t want to be in the movie, because he thought it was too much like his acclaimed Bonnie and Clyde. Jack Lemmon was approached to play Sundance but had to decline because of a scheduling conflict with filming The Odd Couple. Besides, Lemon didn’t like to ride horses. At one point, it was Marlon Brando as Butch and Paul as the Sundance Kid.

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The screenplay was originally titled The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy, but when Steve McQueen dropped out, the title was reversed because Paul Newman was a bigger star. Finally, Robert Redford was the last man standing and was chosen to play the Sundance Kid. He was nine years younger than Paul and got the love interest in the film. Actually, he was originally chosen to play Butch but convinced director George Roy Hill to switch roles between Paul and himself. It was a bonus point that Redford is left-handed, like the real Sundance Kid. Redford had made a nice splash in Barefoot in the Park but was scarcely a household name. But with the release of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford said his life and career were irrevocably changed. Paul knew the movie was going to be a hit from the very beginning. He told Redford, “You’re in your first twenty-million dollar picture.” Paul enjoyed making this movie, calling it “a perfect example of filmmaking as a community experience . . . everybody was geared to invent and create.”12 Newman and Redford were a fine match on-screen and off. Both were huge practical jokers. Director George Roy Hill, notoriously stingy, refused to buy the cast a round of drinks. Paul’s payback? He sawed the director’s office desk in half with a chain saw. It collapsed in the director’s lap when he sat down at it. Paul insisted that playing practical jokes on Hill helped him and Redford get into their characters. A. E. Hotchner suggested that the practical jokes helped Paul “keep himself loose and pliable and imbued with the mischievousness that nourished him.”13 Paul pulled another doozy of a joke on Hill, after filming The Sting. Paul had proposed an alternate ending to the movie, but Hill had refused to consider it. After the wrap party, Hill left to get his car, only to discover that his Chevy had been sawed in half! Hill called a cab to get back to his hotel, where he found Paul waiting for him at the entrance, dangling the keys to Hill’s new ride—a flashy sports car! With a smile he added, “Here’s your new car, George. You needed an upgrade.”14 Redford and Paul also had no hesitation about pulling tricks on each other. As a birthday present for Paul, Redford bought a junkyard Porsche, wheels and fenders removed, tied it with a bright blue

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ribbon (it was, after all a birthday present), and deposited the gift in the Newman driveway. Not to be outdone, Paul had the same Porsche picked up, compacted, then tied with the same blue ribbon and deposited in Redford’s living room! Some of Paul’s jokes were a little more elaborate—and had more powerful effects. For example, Paul and Otto Preminger, director of Exodus, had a tense relationship during the filming of the movie. Preminger had rejected Paul’s suggestions for his character and made clear that actors had no business offering ideas. Frustrated, Paul had a devious plan of reprisal. During a fight scene on the top balcony of a highrise building, Paul was to knock the villain off to fall to a certain death. Instead, Paul substituted a look-alike dummy of himself. Preminger, directing from the ground, saw what he thought was Paul twisting in the wind and landing with a splat. The director was so shaken that even once reassured that his star had survived and was in fact the instigator of the prank, he still required first aid. And yet another notable prank. Although he wasn’t in the food business yet, Paul had a tasty lunch prepared for director Robert Altman. While filming Buffalo Bill and the Indians, he had Altman’s deerskin gloves deep-fried and served for lunch. It’s hard to overestimate the long-term effect of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on both actors. It’s revealing that both Paul and Redford used names from the movie for their charity projects. Paul founded the Hole in the Wall Camps for chronically and terminally ill children. Redford named his movie workshop the Sundance Institute, and the annual cinema festival the Sundance Film Festival. In the movie, to the Oscar-winning song “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” Butch rides Etta Place, the Kid’s love interest, around a meadow on a bike. Butch then does some amazing stunts on the bike, including standing on the seat on one leg with the other straight out behind. The stunt double refused to do the trick, claiming it was too dangerous—so that’s Paul Newman on screen performing acrobatics on the bike. Despite the fact that Etta Place, played by Katherine Ross, is the romantic foil for the Kid, the real relationship in the movie is the one between the two guys. It’s a buddy movie, which has always held a

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special place in American films. Butch Cassidy was a huge box-office success (more than $100 million) and the top grossing film of 1969. Surprisingly, critics were less kind. Vincent Canby in the New York Times wrote, “There are some bothersome technical things about the movie (the camera is all zoom, zoom, zoom) but the over-all production is very handsome, and the performances fine, especially Newman, Redford, and Miss Ross, who must be broadly funny and straight, almost simultaneously. They succeed even if the movie does not.”15 Roger Ebert put the blame on the studios trying to protect their investment in a big star like Paul Newman: “But unfortunately, this good movie is buried beneath millions of dollars that were spent on ‘production values’ that wreck the show. This is often the fate of movies with actors in the million-dollar class, like Newman. Having invested all that cash in the superstar, the studio gets nervous and decides to spend lots of money to protect its investment.”16 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was also one of the last westerns made in Hollywood. What had been a specifically American genre was now eclipsed by the changes in American culture. It was the end of the turbulent counterculture 1960s. American moviemakers were no longer interested in the myths of the old West. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning for Best Cinematography, Best Score, Best Song, and Best Screenplay. The final moment of the movie is a freeze frame of Butch and The Sundance Kid emerging on the street facing a fusillade of bullets. “Too bad they got killed at the end,” Newman said in a Time magazine interview, “cause those two guys could have gone on in films forever.”17 One day, over lunch, Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association, tried to argue otherwise with Paul and Redford: “How about you guys do a sequel to Butch Cassidy.” Paul patiently pointed out, “Jack, we got killed at the end.” Valenti was determined: “Not really. It’s a freeze-frame of you shooting, but you don’t outright die.” Redford tried, “There were a hundred soldiers firing their guns at us.” Valenti made one last attempt: “But you don’t fall down and bleed or anything. Anyway, people don’t remember details like if you really got killed.” Paul decided to change the subject.18

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It’s not like Paul and Redford didn’t try. Right up until almost the end of Newman’s life, he and Redford were trying to find the right vehicle for a movie reunion, although not as Butch and Sundance’s ghosts. But they came close a few years later when Paul, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill reteamed for The Sting. The movie was released in 1973, and audiences were ready for some good, oldfashioned fun. It was a difficult time in America: the Vietnam War and the unrest it provoked were underway, as well as the continuing Watergate crisis, which had been in the daily news for more than a year. The movies in release in 1972 and 1973 were equally tough, for example, The Godfather and Deliverance. In The Sting, two con artists (Newman and Redford) methodically fleece a rich, ruthless racketeer through an elaborate and ingenious scheme that fools the mark, as well as the audience. In his review, Roger Ebert calls it, “one of the most stylish movies of the year. That’s an especially pleasant surprise because it reunites the co-stars and the director of ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ a movie I thought was overrated . . . It’s good to get a crime movie more concerned with humor and character than with blood and gore.”19 As Henry Gondorff, Paul Newman was about as far away from Hud Bannon as one could get. He was not the tough-guy sex symbol in tight jeans. He was the aging con artist in charge of the bright, eager upcoming con Johnny Hooker. Paul was the teacher, Redford the student (and the only one who got the girl, even if she was a paid assassin). This movie was proof positive that Paul was always more interested in playing good characters than in empty, but pretty suits. There is a scene in the movie where a hungover Gondorff dumps a bucket of ice into a sink, fills it with water, and submerges his whole face in it. (A similar scene occurs in Harper as well.) Paul admitted he did the same in real life: “If I’ve had a bad night’s sleep, I take a couple of trays of ice cubes, stick them in the washbasin, turn on the water, get the water freezing cold and stick my head in there.”20 Beauty experts suggest this was the reason for Paul’s perpetually youthful, unlined face. His daily workout routine was a three-mile run, an hour on an exercise bike, weight machines, and sit-ups on a slant board, which he had to give up when he developed a hernia from doing too many of them.

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The Sting was a critical and box-office success. It raked in more than $156 million and won seven Oscars, including one for Best Picture. Paul was busy making movies over the next 10 years, but none that captured the American imagination like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting. From the movie Winning, released in 1969, he began a new career as a race-car driver. He refused to film movies during racing season. But as the 1970s were coming to a close, his personal life took a tragic turn. In November 1978, Paul was back at his alma mater, Kenyon College, directing a play. He got a call, which he later said he had been expecting for a long time. His only son, Scott, had died of an accidental drug overdose. Scott had struggled for years with addictions to drugs and alcohol. He had had a difficult relationship with his father, bitter about his parents’ divorce, resentful of Paul’s second family and his stepmother, and angry about the constant comparisons to his famous father. Addiction was also a family problem. Paul was for many years a functioning alcoholic. He joked often about graduating from college magna cum lager (a type of beer). He routinely drank a case of beer a day. For some time, he also drank hard liquor to excess. As he told Playboy in a 1983 interview, “Sure, I drank whiskey a lot. For a while, it really screwed me up.”21 He was a chain-smoker for decades, finally quitting in 1986. In that same interview, Paul confessed, “In a way, I had been waiting for the call for ten years. Somehow, my body mechanism built me an anesthetic for when it really happened. I was . . . a lot of things when I got that call. I was probably more pissed off than anything . . . I think the difficulties start when both people start working. And then, I think, probably at some point, both people give up. And that can be ten years down the pipe. Scott and I had simply lost the ability to help each other. I had lost the ability to help him, and he had lost the ability to help himself.”22 Paul chose to stay at Kenyon and continue to direct the play. He said, “There was nothing else I could do. I guess it’s funny now; I hardly know a family that isn’t touched by it [addiction] . . . People are just looking around for a sledge hammer somewhere along the line. I gave up hard liquor because I simply couldn’t handle it. That was my sledge hammer. We were finishing shooting Sometimes a Great Notion. I don’t know if

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it was the pressure of the picture, but I really was out of line . . . they say you can take the kid out of Shaker Heights, but you can’t take Shaker Heights out of the kid. Well, oh, yes, you can! You can do that very simply with a fifth of good Scotch. Because then you can never tell what the kid’s likely to do.”23 He explained his own struggle to quit drinking hard liquor: “Like everybody else, a person who has an addictive personality just finds that moment when he simply doesn’t want to do it anymore, if he’s lucky . . . It does not come because other people cuff them heavily about the head and shoulders. I just decided to stop.”24 Paul often felt overwhelmed by grief and guilt over Scott’s death. His longtime friend and partner, A. E. Hotchner, recounted a conversation with Paul. After listing all the ways he had wished he had helped his son, Paul added, “Scott died before he had a fair chance to be a success . . . at something. I think about him . . . often . . . it hurts. The guilt . . . All I could have done . . . and didn’t do.” Hotch tried to comfort his friend, but Paul was clear, “There’s nothing you can say that will repair my guilt about Scott. It will be with me as long as I live.”25 Paul couldn’t save his son, but he could try to save other young men and women. He established the Scott Newman Center, dedicated to preventing drug abuse through education. His other children also struggled with their father’s fame. Daughter Susan explained, “There are times when you feel very trapped. At any given moment, maybe when you haven’t seen your old man in a year and you’re trying to tell him something important about your boyfriend, there are five ladies and gentlemen crowding around yelling, ‘Paul, Paul, sign this!’ And if he doesn’t sign, they yell, ‘I never want to see one of your movies again.’ ”26 Paul understood his children’s frustrations and coped as best he could—although often not to their satisfaction. Paul explained, “There are liabilities and assets. Some of my children have focused more on the liabilities and others have been able to enjoy the assets.”27 He was frequently gone, making movies, or later, on the race-car circuit. He prided himself on never having changed a diaper. He would be the first to admit that “in the early part of my parenthood, I didn’t pay the proper kind of attention. There were terrible, terrible misjudgments.”28

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Paul recognized, later in life, that he had been inconsistent with his children. He admitted, “I was all over the place, too loving one day, too distant the next. One day they were flying on the Concorde, and the next day they were expected to do their own laundry. It was very hard for them to get a balance.” Joanne was honest about her own failings as a stepmother. She said, “Unfortunately, I think that I experimented on them to their detriment, and maybe to the betterment of my children. I mean Scott and I didn’t speak for several years. He was going through difficult times, and I resented the fact that he wasn’t standing on his own feet and was using Paul. That made me angry, for Paul.”29 Susan and Stephanie, Paul’s daughters by his first wife, especially felt torn between the life of privilege they had at their father’s home and the more traditional (although comfortable) life they had with their own mother. Jackie had remarried and had another daughter with her second husband. Jackie was frustrated by the extravagant gifts that Paul and Joanne would give her children, which she couldn’t replicate. Susan recalled a fur coat that her father and stepmother had given her as a present. She was reluctant to tell her mother about it. When she eventually did, the two had a scene with “tears and recriminations. Once again Susan felt she had been put in the middle of things.”30 But by the time of his death, Paul and his daughters were again close.

NOTES 1. Lewis, Richard Warren. “Waiting for a Horse: Paul Newman Makes a Western.” New York Times (November 6, 1966), 28. 2. Reed, Rex. “The Doug and Mary of the Jet Age.” New York Times (September 1, 1968), D9. 3. Ibid. 4. Ebert, Roger. “Newman’s Complaint.” Esquire (September 1969), 11. 5. Billington, Michael. “The Thinking Man’s Outdoor Hero.” Times (February 8, 1969). 6. Greenberg, Peter S. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (April 1983), http://www.playboy.com/articles/1983-interview-with-paulnewman. 7. Billington, “The Thinking Man’s Outdoor Hero.”

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8. Adler, Renata. “ ‘Rachel, Rachel,’ Portrait of a Spinster.” New York Times (August 27, 1968), 36. 9. Schickel, Richard. “A Movie Too True to Be Good.” Life (October 4, 1968). 10. Greenberg, “Playboy Interview.” 11. Billington, “The Thinking Man’s Outdoor Hero.” 12. O’Brien, Daniel. Paul Newman. London: Faber and Faber, 2005, 154. 13. Hotchner, A. E. Paul and Me. New York: Doubleday, 2010, 89. 14. Ibid., 90. 15. Canby, Vincent. “Slapstick and Drama Cross Paths in ‘Butch Cassidy.’ ” New York Times (September 25, 1969), 54. 16. Ebert, Roger. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Chicago Sun-Times (October 13, 1969), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/ pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19691013/REVIEWS/910130301/1023. 17. Worrell, Denise, John Skow, and Elaine Dutka. “Paul Newman: Verdict on a Superstar.” Time (December 6, 1982), http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,923114,00.html. 18. Hotchner, Paul and Me, 19. 19. Ebert, Roger. “The Sting.” Chicago Sun-Times (December 27, 1973), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/ 19731227/REVIEWS/312270301/1023. 20. Greenberg, “Playboy Interview.” 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Hotchner, Paul and Me, 78. 26. Dowd, Maureen. “Testing Himself.” New York Times Magazine (September 28, 1986), SM16. 27. Ibid. 28. Griffin, Nancy. “Newman’s Luck.” AARP (May & June 2005), http:// www.aarp.org/politics-society/newsmakers/info-2005/newmans_luck/. 29. Oumano, Elena. Paul Newman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, 180. 30. Ibid., 226–27.

Chapter 8

THE BUSINESSMAN

Paul Newman fought joining the family business, but it’s clear that he would have been incredibly successful had he chosen that career path. With his good looks and genial manner, he was a red-hot salesman, hawking sporting goods at Newman-Stern and, later, encyclopedias door-to-door. But he also had a strong instinct for starting businesses that filled a need: the corsage/floral bouquets he sold to his fellow students and the laundry service he created at Kenyon. Add in that he knew how to creatively market his businesses, like offering free beer to students who used his laundry service. Paul had the normal investments of stocks, bonds, and real estate that a man who made the kind of money he earned would have. But an outlandish Christmas gift project eventually transformed Paul Newman from movie star to entrepreneur extraordinaire. To set the scene, it was the week before Christmas, 1980. Paul called his old friend, A. E. Hotchner (acclaimed biographer of Ernest Hemingway, as well as the author of other books and movies), to come over and help with a massive gift project. He intended to give his homemade dressing to friends and family who lived in Westport.

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Paul had always been a stickler about salad dressings. He routinely instructed waiters, even in the most expensive restaurants, to bring him plain lettuce and the olive oil, red wine vinegar, mustard, and other condiments he needed to make his own dressing. One time, a waiter served him salad that already had the restaurant’s signature dressing on it. Paul took the lettuce leaves to the men’s room, washed them off, and asked the waiter to bring him the ingredients for his own homemade dressing. That Christmas season, Hotch, as he was known, found Paul in the basement of the barn located on the Newman’s Westport estate. As described by Hotch in the book he coauthored with Newman, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good, it wasn’t “a basement in the usual sense. There were crusty stones, a dirt floor, crumbling cement, and overhead timbers covered with active cobwebs. Also three long since vacated horse stalls, but the unmistakable aroma of horses remained. There were desiccated manure fragments here and there, and there was evidence that certain field animals were still occupying the premises. A very picturesque place in which to mix salad dressing.”1 Since the idea was to fill at least 30 bottles with his dressing, Paul was still tinkering with the proportions for his super-sized salad dressing, which he figured included six boxes of black pepper. He was mixing the brew in a huge vat, stirring with an oar from his canoe. When Paul and Hotch finally finished filling the gift bottles, there was still a huge amount of dressing left in the tub. Paul suggested that they bottle the remainder and sell it in an upscale grocery store. Hotch pointed out that they had be breaking every law on food preparation, and they had no insurance to cover the multitude of suits that would surely follow. Reluctantly, Paul agreed that this batch wouldn’t be offered for sale, but the idea of selling his dressing had just been born. At least part of Paul’s motivation for pursuing this project was that he never backed down from a challenge—and everyone he met in the food business insisted that it would be a challenge that had virtually no chance of success. But beating the odds was what made life interesting. To be sure, some of his interest was the sheer audacity and fun of it all. Frankly, he could financially afford to indulge this little business experiment. But, equally important, Paul Newman’s mind was always churning, refusing to accept the conventional wisdom about most enterprises

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and activities. Had he followed conventional wisdom, he would never have left Cleveland and Newman-Stern. And he quickly learned from experts that the conventional wisdom was that celebrities never succeeded in the food business. As one marketing executive pointed out, “No offense, Mr. Newman, but just because they liked you as Butch Cassidy doesn’t mean they’ll like your salad dressing.”2 The marketing firm wanted to conduct focus groups across the country to determine if the public would like Paul’s salad dressing—at a cost between $300,000 and $400,000. And that would be just the beginning. The marketing executives advised Paul and Hotch that most of the big companies estimate it costs a million dollars to launch a new product— with no guarantee of success. In fact, as another expert pointed out, “There’s never been a real celebrity success in the food business. We estimate the total start-up loss for celebrity products somewhere close to nine hundred million dollars.”3 Paul and Hotch left the meeting determined to continue, but by their own rules. They decided that they would invite their friends and neighbors to a blind taste testing, pitting Newman’s dressing against all the leading brands. This focus group would cost $40 instead of $400,000. Instead of the million dollars the experts said they would need to launch a new product, they agreed that Paul would put up $40,000 as the seed money for this venture. Hotch would do the legwork in finding a bottler, label designer, food broker, and so forth. They would share the brainstorming responsibilities. Once the money was used up, they would move on to another adventure. As Hotch explained, “From the very beginning, we bucked tradition. When the experts said that something was ‘always done’ in a certain way, we’d do it our way, which was sometimes the very opposite.”4 But even those who buck tradition sometimes have to face reality. So the grand plan to package the dressing in faux wine bottles—or at least some other interesting design—was quickly discarded when they learned that their ideas wouldn’t work with assembly-line machinery. They settled on a traditional container. But even that concession didn’t solve the greater problem of finding a bottler willing to work with them. That was Hotch’s job. Paul, while

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filming Absence of Malice and The Verdict, was searching for the perfect olive oil, red wine vinegar, mustard—the right ingredients were critical. Despite fighting upstream for this crazy idea, they both still thought it would work. As Paul and Hotch wrote: “A movie guy and his writer buddy going hard against the odds. Like Butch and Sundance jumping off a cliff into a business and marketing canyon—the fall will kill us if the sharks in the supermarkets don’t. It was a lunatic thing, like a bumblebee or a helicopter. There’s no reason for it to fly, but then again, there were the Wright brothers.”5 Finally, they found Andy Crowley who ran a small bottling plant outside of Boston. His company produced Ken’s and other private-label

Paul Newman has his arm around actress Sally Field as they talk during a news conference for their film, Absence of Malice, in Miami, Florida, December 14, 1980. AP Photo/Kathy Willens.

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salad dressings. But having solved one problem, Paul and Hotch faced an even more troublesome issue. They were determined that their salad dressing had to be all natural—no preservatives or additives. Andy Crowley recalls his initial reaction to the idea, that “these people might prove to be a bunch of flakes.” His production department was even more skeptical when they studied Newman’s recipe. As Crowley explained, “What was unusual about [the recipe] was that unlike the other dressings on the supermarket shelves, dressings made with low oil content, white cider vinegar, dehydrated onion, and garlic, all of which saves a lot of money, this formula used none of the tools of preservation.” Shelf life is key to supermarket products. Crowley pointed out to Paul and Hotch, “If a bottled dressing cannot stay on the shelf for somewhere in the neighborhood of a year, it will not be acceptable to the supermarkets.”6 He urged Paul and Hotch to add some of the chemicals necessary for preservation. But the two would-be entrepreneurs stuck to their guns: all natural meant no chemicals— period. And once again, Newman’s luck struck. Crowley’s production department discovered that the ingredients in Paul’s dressing formed a natural gum, which prevented quick spoilage. And even more surprising, when put through a longevity test, Paul’s dressing passed with flying colors. Over the next six months, Crowley provided Newman and Hotch more than 30 samples as the bottler tinkered with what was basically a recipe for salad dressing for eight into a commercial product that could be reproduced in every bottle manufactured. And each sample was returned with instructions for additional tweaking. Finally, Crowley had had enough. He informed Paul and Hotch that he was dropping the project—and the entrepreneurs were back to square one, but undaunted. Before searching for a new bottler, they decided to hold a blind taste test with their neighbors in Westport. Paul and Hotch decided that if their dressing didn’t win, they would give up the project. They put out 20 identical bowls, each filled with a different commercial salad dressing, and one filled with theirs. They had lettuce leaves for dipping, water to cleanse the palate between each taste, and score pads to rate the

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dressings on a scale of 1 to 10. Paul’s dressing came in first for all the testers, except for two who rated it second. One of the guests at the taste testing was Martha Stewart, then a local caterer in Westport, but who later also turned out to be a bit of an entrepreneur herself. Martha loved the dressing but suggested putting a fresh bay leaf in each bottle. Again, the practical side of the business reared its ugly head. On a conveyor belt, assembly workers couldn’t possibly insert a fresh bay leaf into each bottle speeding by at 60 a minute! While the marketing experts wouldn’t consider this homemade focus group scientifically precise, it was enough to convince Paul and Hotch to keep moving forward. Paul named the company Salad King, with himself as president, and Hotch as vice president. They had no insurance, didn’t have a label, and most important, didn’t have a product in a bottle to sell, but they were now legally incorporated. But since they didn’t have any headquarters (unless the basement of the Newman’s barn counted), Paul’s lawyer used his office as the corporation’s address. A racing buddy of Paul’s made the next critical connection for the would-be salad-dressing entrepreneurs. He introduced them to Stew Leonard, the owner of a small chain of supermarkets headquartered in a neighboring town. Leonard advised them again about the long odds they were facing. But then pointed out, “If your dressing is really good, you’ve got a good shot at it since you’ll sell the first bottle because your face is on the label.” Paul was appalled. “Whoa! My face is on the label?” Leonard insisted that it was absolutely critical, especially since Paul and Hotch had explained that they didn’t intend to advertise the product. The supermarket executive asked, “How will the customer know it’s you?” Paul pointed out the name: “It’ll say Newman’s Own.” Leonard was adamant. “For all they know, that could be Seymour Newman from Newark, New Jersey. You will not be able to sell bottle one unless your face is on the label, that’s for sure.”7 Leonard offered to set up a taste testing in his store—and guaranteed Paul and Hotch that if their salad dressing was as good as they said, he would arrange for Andy Crowley at Ken’s to bottle it.

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Paul pointed out that Crowley had already turned them down, but Leonard had an ace up his sleeve: “Gentlemen, I am Andy’s best customer—I sell more Ken’s than all his other customers combined. If your dressing measures up, I assure you he will bottle it.” After the meeting, Paul was still troubled at the concept of putting his face on a bottle of salad dressing. But he then told Hotch, “You know, there could be a kind of justice here. I go on television all the time to hustle my films. TV gets me and my time for free, and the film gets exposure for free—mutual and circular exploitation, so to speak. Now then, if we were to go the lowest of the low roads and plaster my face on a bottle of oil and vinegar dressing just to line our pockets, it would stink. But to go the low road to get to the high road—shameless exploitation for charity, for the common good—now there’s an idea worth the hustle, a reciprocal trade agreement.”8 It was agreed. Paul would put his face on the bottle, and all profits would be donated to charity. But there was still a lot of work to be done—and again, Paul Newman was insistent that the Salad Kings do it their way. As Stew Leonard predicted, given the implicit threat to pull all his business from Ken’s, Andy Crowley agreed to bottle Newman’s Own. But he put his foot down on one issue. Crowley insisted, “I extracted a concession from Paul and Hotch. I pointed out that I had eliminated the gums and EDTA, but that fresh garlic and onion were adding elements that would very likely curdle the entire mix. No one has ever used them fresh because they would be active and volatile. I put my foot down—they would use dehydrated like everyone else. It’s all natural, it’s just dehydrated.”9 Paul and Hotch reluctantly agreed—a decision they would soon regret. So with a bottler, a product, and a distinct label that poked fun at the whole enterprise (“Fine Foods Since February”), they were ready to launch Newman’s Own. By now they had rented a two-room office located above a bank. Still operating on the original $40,000 investment (but having already spent $20,000 for labels and start-up costs), they furnished the place with Paul’s out-of-season pool furniture, including the umbrella over their shared desk—his picnic table.

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Financially, they were also organized differently. They were an S Corporation, which meant that all profits and royalties had to be paid out by December 31 each year—which also meant that they had to borrow from the bank every January 1 to stay in business. They would be innovators in other ways. Based on their own experiences, as an actor and writer, respectively, who each saw the money due them always tied up for months (even years) by a movie company or publisher, they set up a new bookkeeping system of payment for their product. The result was that they never spent the remaining $20,000 of the original stake—and the first $20,000 was recouped in six weeks after they opened for business. Even their insistence on not advertising paid off. Instead, they organized clever launch parties with Paul and Joanne singing the praises of Newman’s Own Salad Dressing with lyrics, written by Hotch, and music based on show tunes. Invitations were sent out to the head buyers of the major supermarket chains, as well as to the newspapers, television stations, wire services, and magazines. Paul insisted that he had a voice like an ice pick, but Hotch reassured him that it would keep the press awake. The gamble paid off. They didn’t need to advertise, because they got a tremendous reaction from the press. Articles appeared everywhere. Sales skyrocketed. As Michael Rourke, then vice president for marketing and corporate affairs for A&P, explained, “strong public relations, which they have, can compensate for lack of advertising, and they’ve had tremendous publicity. With all those TV interviews and articles and columns written by food editors—that’s the kind of publicity that’s worth more than all the advertising dollars Newman could possibly spend.” But he also cautioned, “Consumers won’t buy an image twice. They have to like it.”10 And the public did like the fresh new taste of Newman’s Own. But there was still one correction that needed to be made. The New York Times food critic, Mimi Sheraton, disparaged the dressing’s “overpowering dehydrated onion and garlic flavors.”11 The criticism stung and reinforced Paul’s belief that he had compromised his standards. He personally called Ken’s chemist and insisted that the bottler had to find a way to use fresh onion and garlic. It wasn’t going to be easy—or inexpensive since it added steps to the dressing’s formulation—but

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Actress Joanne Woodward displays with pride her husband Paul Newman’s newest creations at a party on December 15, 1982, in Los Angeles. The party introduced Newman’s Own salad dressing and Industrial Strength spaghetti sauce. AP Photo/ Nick Ut.

it permitted Newman’s Own to be the first to use the word fresh on the label. Other salad-dressing companies soon followed suit—but then reverted back to dehydrated, unwilling to shoulder the extra cost. But as from the beginning, today Newman’s Own remains committed to using fresh ingredients, without additives and preservatives in all its products. Paul and Hotch posted a sign in their office that summed up their business philosophy: “There are three rules for running a business: Fortunately, we don’t know any of them.” In 1985, Hotch told the New

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York Times, “We have been offered countless millions to be bought out . . . It’s more fun to have a couple of bumbling idiots running the company.”12 All those years after he fled Cleveland and Newman-Stern, Paul discovered something about himself. As he got more involved in Newman’s Own, he remarked, “I begin to understand the romance of business—the allure of being the biggest fish in the pond and the juice you get from beating out your competitors.”13 He often joked, “The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films.” In 1992, a new generation of Newmans joined the company. Daughter Nell had a degree from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, and had trained to be an ornithologist. She lived in California and worked on bird conservation issues. She had long been interested in organic foods, despite her father’s reaction that organic equaled bad taste. In an odd twist of fate, Nell happened to be listening to a public radio fund-raiser when she heard the name of a new donor— Peter Meehan. She knew Peter—he had owned the company that had cleaned her family’s Westport pool. But Peter had sold that company and moved to California, settling within a few miles of Nell. He was looking for a new business—and Nell had an idea. To overcome her father’s suspicions that organic meant tasteless, Nell secretly cooked a Thanksgiving dinner made from entirely organic products. Paul was impressed and agreed to front Nell and her business partner Peter Meehan $125,000 to research the possibility of adding an organic line to Newman’s Own. There was one proviso. Nell and Peter would have to pay the investment back because, as Paul said, “It’s charity money that I would have given away.”14 They decided to focus on pretzels, as Paul had indicated that it was one of his favorite snack foods, and he “didn’t want one that tasted like a dog bone.”15 Pretzels, based on mainstream recipes, but using organic products, were a hit. They called the new division: Newman’s Own Organics, The Second Generation. Their slogan was “Great-tasting products that happen to be organic.” Within three years, Newman’s Own Organics held a 75 percent share of the organic-pretzel market. They expanded into other products like chocolate bars, popcorn, and cookies. Following the unusual label designs of the original Newman’s

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Own products, Nell and her father decided that the organic food labels would feature Paul and Nell, dressed like Grant Wood’s American Gothic couple. Paul offered to let Nell and her business partner keep the profits from Newman’s Own Organics, since the partners didn’t have the income that Paul had. But like her father, Nell wouldn’t even consider it. She insisted that the profits would be donated to charity and that her employees would help decide what charities would benefit. Paul was delighted and proud. In 1997, Paul and Hotch decided that the company had outgrown their ability to manage it. They hired professionals to run and expand Newman’s Own, while still maintaining the commitment to products made with fresh ingredients and no chemicals and additives. The new executives were faithful to Paul’s vision, forging a partnership with America’s Second Harvest and the Ford Motor Company to provide food and trucks to food banks around the country. Newman’s Own also works with Citymeals-on-Wheels. Today, more than 25 years after the first salad dressing was introduced to the public, the multinational company has survived the death of Paul Newman and continues to grow, thrive, and introduce new products. In addition to 24 varieties of salad dressing, the company also produces a wide variety of marinades, drinks, salsa, wines, steak sauce, spaghetti sauces, cereals, popcorn, and pizza. But what to do with all those profits? Paul Newman had made a promise to himself, and he intended to keep it.

NOTES 1. Newman, Paul, and A. E. Hotchner. Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good: The Madcap Business Adventure of the Truly Oddest Couple. New York: Random House, 2003, 3. 2. Ibid., 11. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 19. 5. Ibid., 23. 6. Ibid., 26.

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7. Ibid., 36. 8. Ibid., 37. 9. Ibid., 42. 10. Ibid., 77. 11. Ibid., 398. 12. Lawson, Carol. “Paul Newman the Philanthropist: A Real-Life Role.” New York Times (January 25, 1985), B6. 13. Levy, Shawn. Newman: A Life. Harmony Books, 2009, 339. 14. Smith, Dave. “Nell Newman and Peter Meehan—Newman’s Own Organics.” Organictobe.org (August 25, 2007), http://organictobe.org/2007/08/25/nell-newman-and-peter-meehan-newmans-ownorganics/. 15. For an excellent overview of the creation of Newman’s Own, see Newman and Hotchner. Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good.

Chapter 9

TAKING CHARITY TO A NEW LEVEL

In the first six months Salad King was in business, sales were $502,000, with a profit of $65,000. Paul and Hotch distributed the money to charity, as they had promised. In less than three years, by the end of 1984, sales of 18,705,555 bottles of dressing, plus 8,371,726 bottles of their new product, spaghetti sauce, created $2,023,105 in profits to give away. What started out as a lark had morphed into a huge opportunity to do good. As Paul explained, “We felt we had to share the good fortune with others. Besides, there is something repugnant about my face on the label and money in my pocket.”1 In the early years, Paul and Hotch sifted through hundreds of requests, sitting at their boardroom table, which was actually Paul’s pingpong table that had been relocated from his home along with the patio furniture that served as their office décor. It was time consuming, as Hotch explained in a 1985 New York Times interview: “We’ve discovered that being philanthropists is more difficult than being an actor or a writer. It’s almost a full-time job.” And yet, the opportunity to make a real difference was exhilarating. In that same interview, Hotch added, “We give to little charities, not

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to mainstream charities. We give to the very old and the very young. You can pinpoint your giving if you really care about it. You can help a particular group, a particular cause.”2 They did give to major charities like Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (which would later treat Paul for his final illness), the Society to Advance the Retarded and Handicapped, and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. But they got a huge amount of satisfaction from helping small programs that wouldn’t normally be on anyone’s radar. For example, in 1984, they received a letter from Sister Carol Putnam, a nun from Indiantown, Florida, who ran the Hope Rural School for the children of migrant farmworkers. She wrote, “I am hunting desperately for help for a new bus. Ours does not pass inspection for the fall. A new bus costs $26,000. I have written to several sources and have gotten a ‘no’ so far. A bus will last us ten years and we cannot pick up the children without one.”3 Hope Rural School provided schooling for children scattered all over the county. These youngsters often worked in the fields alongside their parents, traveling constantly throughout the United States doing seasonal work. Hope Rural School, which was built by the migrant workers themselves, had a flexible term that permitted students to attend classes during the picking season in central Florida. It was not limited to the normal September-to-June school year. As Sister Carol explained, “When our school bus was condemned this past summer by the state authorities, my worst fears were realized. With no bus to transport these children from their homes miles away, the school would be worthless, and many of the children would return to their hopeless lives in the fields.” This is where Paul could make an immediate difference. He sent a check for $26,000 to the Blue Bird Bus Company, and the Hope Rural School got a new bus. Thirteen years later, when that bus wore out, Newman’s Own paid for a replacement. As Paul said, “I never thought I’d get into science, but being able to turn salad dressing into a school bus—that’s the kind of chemistry that tickles the fancy.”4 Over the years, as the charitable foundation grew, the gifts covered an eclectic range of programs. They endowed a $25,000 First Amendment

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Prize “to honor a U.S. resident who has fought courageously, despite adversity, to safeguard the First Amendment right to freedom of expression as it applies to the written word.” It was administered through the PEN American Center, an association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. As Paul explained at a press conference in the PEN office in 1992 announcing the establishment of the award, “One of the basic guarantees of the Bill of Rights is freedom of the press, freedom to write and publish without any abridgement . . . It is to safeguard and promote that freedom that we have established this award. To paraphrase Voltaire, it is our philosophy that although we may disapprove of what you write, we will defend to the death your right to write it.”5 Nominees have included writers, publishers, journalists, editors, booksellers, schoolteachers, and librarians. Some examples of the efforts made by candidates included an individual who called for the reinstatement of a newspaper or magazine editor whose writing led to dismissal, or one who worked to restore a banned book to a library’s shelves. By 1985, Paul wanted to do more. Newman’s Own had from the beginning donated to charities that benefited children, especially those who were ill. Paul had the idea, one he claimed he just woke up with one morning, to establish a camp for children with life-threatening diseases. It would be called the Hole in the Wall Camp, after the Hole in the Wall Gang in the hit movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As Paul explained his motivations for the camp, note how Newman’s luck once again plays a role: “I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others: made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it.”6 In announcing the camp, Paul used his usual wry humor to explain, “This is made possible by salad dressing, and by the people who buy the damn stuff.”7 Newman’s Own pledged $4 million in profits from the company, which was expected to cost $8 million to build and endow. Tax regulations required that every dollar donated by Newman’s Own be matched by an outside source. There were corporate gifts and donations of time, materials, and expertise. But still short of needing

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the funds to match Newman’s Own, luck once again intervened with a donation from an unusual source. Khaled Alhegelan, the son of a Saudi Arabian diplomat, learned about the plans for the Hole in the Wall Camp. Alhegelan had grown up with thalessemia, a debilitating form of anemia that had severely limited his activities as a child. He believed that this type of camp could make a huge difference in the life of a sick youngster. Under the rules of his country, any Saudi citizen can petition the king for assistance in personal matters. Alhegelan asked, and King Fahd donated $5 million. Construction began right away. Making sure that the camp was financially secure was important to Paul. “It’s going to be endowed, so eight years down the pike we won’t have to sell it to a condominium developer because we don’t have enough money to run the camp.”8 Paul also insisted that no family ever be charged for their youngster’s participation. To date, more than 135,000 children from all over the world have attended one of the Hole in the Wall Camps. But clearly a camp for sick children has to have much more than a swimming pool and playing fields. While Paul might have started Newman’s Own as a lark, he carefully researched what needed to be done to start such a program. He visited camps in California and New Jersey that were already being run for sick children and learned about the medical requirements that a camp for children with cancer would need and the value of having a camp that was designed specifically for that purpose. He was impatient and wanted to move quickly but was also extremely careful about where, when, and how the camp would be located, staffed, and run. After looking at existing campsites, and rejecting one because it was adjacent to power lines and there was concern that the fields of energy might affect the children’s health, Paul and Hotch decided to take a different approach. They enlisted Dr. Howard Pearson, then chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Yale-New Haven Hospital, to help them choose a campsite. That way the medical component would always be factored in to the choice of site. They also recruited Tom Beeby, then dean of the Yale School of Architecture. They found a site in Ashford, Connecticut, near the Massachusetts border. It was 300 acres, mostly level, with a 45-acre pond. The site was

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untouched, except for gorgeous wildflowers. But untouched also meant that everything would need to be done in order to transform it into a camp for sick children. They would need to bring in electric and phone lines, septic tanks, roadways, fences, walkways, abridgments, landscaping, and of course, all the buildings. Paul wrote to the towns of Ashford and Eastford (where a small part of the land was located) to get approval for the camp. He said, The general concept for this camp arose as the result of the demand and need that I became aware of in the last two years. The requests for funds for the benefit of youngsters who are critically, and in many cases terminally, ill call me to embark on this project. It is my hope that this project will bring some peace and happiness to some suffering children and some respite from their pain and anguish. . . . As I approach my dotage, I become acutely aware of the privilege of long life and the sense of accomplishment and completion that can be run from that simple piece of good fortune. At the same time it reminds me that some children, at a whim and perverse stroke of bad fortune, are deprived of that privilege. It occurred to me how rewarding it might be for us of privilege if we were to provide some few weeks for these young people where they could be together, establish common bonds under the umbrella of an old-fashioned camp experience—the likes of which I remember so vividly from my childhood.9 Eventually all permissions were granted, and now Paul demanded the impossible. He wanted the camp to open in a year. Every expert on his team said it couldn’t be done. They argued that the architectural plans weren’t even complete; that they would have to build through a New England winter (the on-site manager eventually had to recruit construction workers from Canada who were used to working in brutal winters!); and that they couldn’t possibly raise the $10 million in financing that the project would require (and which would undoubtedly go higher during the course of construction and new problems arose). And perhaps most compelling, what if they enrolled a group of

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sick children to attend and then had to disappoint them if the camp wasn’t ready? Tom Beeby recounts in Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good that once he saw Newman’s Own offices, with the pingpong table doubling as the conference table, the hilarious sayings on the wall, and the patio furniture, he knew, “the notion of what might be possible dawned on me, that this was not an ordinary client. These were a couple of guys who were willing to take risks, had a great sense of humor, and were willing to try anything . . . Paul’s architectural theory was that whenever you got to the point where you’d make something more the same or more different, always make it more different . . . This town was a fantasy place where kids would go and forget their past, forget their current medical problems. That evolved as the major theme of the camp, and the look was rather cinematic.”10 Paul envisioned the camp as a re-creation of the western town in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He didn’t want the typical, institutional camp. They were to create a small town with the main buildings in the middle and the cabins surrounding it, like a settlement in the old West. Paul had faith in the men and women he entrusted to transform this concept for a camp into a reality. Still, he was actively involved in every decision and knew every detail, including even the hardware being used. As Beeby explained, “Paul was obviously the inspirational driving force behind [the camp] . . . Paul always kept a firm hand on the tiller.” Medically speaking, the Hole in the Wall Camp had never been done before. It was the first time a camp had been physically programmatically built for the specific needs of sick children. The goal was to have fun and, if possible, get away from the demanding medical regimen these children were on. As Dr. Pearson explained, “The primary mission of the camp is to serve children with catastrophic blood diseases from the ages of 7 to 17. We want to give them a memorable experience. For many, it will be their only time away from home except a visit to the hospital . . . Some [existing camps] will not take children who need medication or indwelling catheters because they provide a chance for infection. We want to be as inclusive as possible.”11 The children would not be coming to the camp for treatment, but they might need

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treatment once there. There was a landing pad at the camp for a helicopter. In case of a severe life-threatening emergency, the child could be transported to Yale-New Haven Hospital, 30 minutes away by air. The infirmary was as well-equipped for an emergency as any hospital. The construction workers were barely pulling away from the site when the first campers were arriving. Despite the incredible credentials of the experts that Paul had recruited for the project, many parents still were wary of sending their sick child to an untested program. That first season, there were probably more counselors than campers. But it was a success, nonetheless. As Hotch recalls, “The great shock was that this was not at all a somber, hospital-type experience, but a joyful one for the children and for us. These children had the time of their lives from the moment they set foot on the campgrounds, whether they were in a wheelchair, on crutches, whatever, the ones that could walk pushed the ones who couldn’t. The ones who had hair painted the bald heads of the ones who had no hair. It was a release for all of them.”12

Paul Newman gestures as he arrives at the Hole in the Wall Camp in Ashford, Connecticut, on June 9, 1988. Newman was the camp founder, and $7 million of profits from his Newman’s Own Food Products Inc. was contributed to help finance the camp. AP Photo/Bob Child.

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After that first season, the Hole in the Wall Camp in Ashford, Connecticut, has been filled to capacity. Ten other camps have since been built in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Camps are in development in Colorado, Ohio, and Washington. There is also the Hole in the Wall Camps Global Partnership Initiative, begun in 2001. It grew out of a visit Paul made to Africa. It is aimed at extending the camp experience to children living with HIV/AIDS. The organization works with local groups and medical clinics to offer the traditional camp model along with therapeutic recreation, HIV education, wilderness awareness, and conservation. To date, it has educated and empowered 2,700 children and trained more than 350 local staff members in Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, Lesotho, and Vietnam. One young camper wrote about her own experience at the Hole in the Wall Camp: “I think it’s real cool that it doesn’t cost anything because the kids don’t have much money left because they paid all the hospital bills. And it’s great that they can finally go have fun. And live while they can. I meet new people, and it’s so good to meet other sick kids because they can help you through when you’re having trouble, and you help them when they’re down . . . I think that hope and love and laughing and confidence are all over camp; in a way they’re growing as much as the grass is.”13 After his experience with Newman’s Own, in 1998, Paul cofounded the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP). The group’s mission is “to lead the business community in raising the level and quality of corporate philanthropy.” As Paul explained, “I helped to start CECP with the belief that corporate America could be a force for good in society.”14 On a personal level, he and Joanne gave generously and privately, out of their own funds. In the last years of Paul’s life, he and Joanne would send Christmas cards to friends with a note that read, “We have more than we need. Call this number and tell my assistant your favorite charity. I’ll try not to embarrass you.” Donations of $5,000 to $10,000 would then follow.15 Paul hated what he called “noisy philanthropy.” He believed that charitable giving should be anonymous but was realistic enough to

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know that for Newman’s Own to be successful in being able to donate to so many charities, “you have to be noisy . . . publicize the generosity in order to become more generous.”16 He spoke often about the children he met at the camp—he was a frequent visitor—and what they taught him. As one child said, “Coming up here is what I live for, what I stay alive for during those miserable eleven months and two weeks to come up here for the summer.”17 Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate and former Hole in the Wall counselor, wrote after Paul’s death, “Newman never stopped believing he was a regular guy who’d simply been blessed, and well beyond what was fair . . . So he just kept paying it forward.”18

NOTES 1. Lawson, Carol. “Paul Newman’s Camp for Children with Leukemia.” New York Times (September 18, 1986), C1. 2. Ibid. 3. Newman, Paul, and A. E. Hotchner. Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good: The Madcap Business Adventure of the Truly Oddest Couple. New York: Random House, 2003, 119. 4. Newman’s Own Foundation. “About Newman’s Own, Inc.” Newman’s Own Foundation, http://www.newmansownfoundation.org/ paul/newmansowninc.php. 5. Pen American Center. “PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award.” Pen American Center, http://www.pen.org/freedom/noa.htm. 6. Association of Hole in the Wall Camps. “About Paul Newman.” Association of Hole in the Wall Camps, http://www.holeinthewallcamps. org/Page.aspx?pid=256. 7. Lawson, “Paul Newman’s Camp for Children with Leukemia,” C1. 8. Ibid. 9. Newman, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit, 131. 10. Ibid., 137, 138. 11. Lawson, “Paul Newman’s Camp for Children with Leukemia,” C1. 12. Newman, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit, 154. 13. Ibid., 143.

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14. Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy. “Home page.” Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, http://www.corporatephilanthropy.org/index.php. 15. Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009 434. 16. Newman, Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit, 199. 17. Levy, Paul Newman, 365. 18. Lithwick, Dahlia. “Paul Newman: He used his fame to give away his fortune.” Slate (September 27, 2008), http://www.slate.com/ id/2201116.

Chapter 10

THE ACTIVIST

There aren’t many people, perhaps none, who have been awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and also ranked number 19 on the enemies list of President Richard Nixon. Of all the awards he received, including his Oscar for The Color of Money, Paul often commented that being on the president’s enemies list was “the highest single honor I’ve ever received.” He later said, very seriously, about the award, “None delighted me or elevated me in the eyes of my children more than my placement as number nineteen on Mr. Nixon’s enemies list.”1 Paul Newman didn’t trade in his political activist card when he became a famous movie star. He took citizenship seriously. He did more than sign checks and contribute to candidates he supported. Throughout his life, he was willing to get out in the trenches, march with protesters, walk the picket lines, debate, and support people and causes he believed in. He traced his political leanings from his father, an ardent liberal: “My mother wasn’t political at all. My father was a Rooseveltian. He was incredibly moral and ethical about everything he did.”2

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Paul disagreed with those who argued that celebrities had a disproportionate influence on public opinion, especially on political issues. Explaining his view in a Playboy interview, Paul insisted, “Who’s to say who’s an expert? Just because I can sway more people than I have a right to, does that mean that I’m not entitled to my opinions or to voice them? The world situation affects us, as movie people, as much as it does anyone else. Naturally, we’ve got to be careful about using our disproportionate ‘image power’ to sway public opinion by speaking out on the issues. But you’ve got a choice. Do you abdicate the responsibilities of citizenship merely because you carry a Screen Actor’s Guild card? Or do you dig deeply and become as knowledgeable and expert as you can and speak your piece and hope you weight is thrown on the right side? As a feeling, thinking American, I have to get involved.”3 In an interview in Rolling Stone, he explained that he hadn’t been politically active until the 1950s when McCarthy changed things for him: “I heard about people losing their jobs. As a matter of fact, my cousin was involved. I think that’s probably what brought it home. He was with Westinghouse. He was one of the guys who was intimately involved with the development of the proximity fuse, which was probably the second most important development in the war. He was thrown out because he was no longer considered a good security risk.” The reasons for concern? “One, he had been divorced. Two, he was married to a woman of Russian extraction, but she had been a citizen of this country for I don’t know how many years. And, three, he was known to consort with homosexuals, because he was on the board of the Cleveland Playhouse.”4 In the end, Paul’s cousin fought back in court—and won. Paul started small. In 1952, despite his familial and professional demands, he found time to stuff envelopes for Adlai Stevenson, a Democrat running for president against General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Paul became more active in the 1960s. He had always been a strong supporter of civil rights and joined Martin Luther King Jr. at the famous March on Washington in August 1963. A few days before the March on Washington, Paul traveled with Marlon Brando, Anthony Franciosa, and Virgil Frye to Gadsden, Alabama, to help fight for racial equality. The mayor of the town accused the four actors of being rabble-rousers, refused to meet with them, and threatened them with

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jail. Paul was angry at the charges of meddling and pointed out that the U.S. State Department often asked entertainers to serve as ambassadors of good will abroad. “We would like to hope perhaps that we can be considered the same kind of ambassadors in the South,” said Paul. Furthermore, he added, “It’s all right when we come down South to raise money for a hospital. And it’s perfectly all right when we are asked to donate our services for other humanitarian causes. They don’t call us rabblerousers then.”5 Paul later learned that his movies were pulled from local theaters in protest. In 1970, he was one of the narrators of the documentary King: A Filmed Record . . . from Montgomery to Memphis. Paul was fervently against the Vietnam War, and in 1968, he plunged into politics, almost full time, on behalf of Eugene McCarthy who was running for the Democratic nomination on an antiwar platform. In a Playboy interview, Paul shared the reasons for his decision to join McCarthy’s campaign: “I was so fed up with the present Administration [of President Lyndon Baines Johnson] that I couldn’t resist going to work for [McCarthy]. I found him to be a dedicated, courageous human being. It took guts to lay his cards on the table, to oppose a President who belonged to his own political party.”6 Paul was in the midst of editing Rachel, Rachel, a project especially dear to both Paul and his wife Joanne Woodward, who was starring in the film. But Paul believed that a Democratic alternative to President Johnson was essential for ending the war. In Elena Oumano’s book Paul Newman, a fellow campaigner for McCarthy recalls Paul’s stock answer to those who criticized a Hollywood star for telling them how to vote. In reply to the angry, Who are you? question, Paul would calmly say, “I’m a citizen, I’m a father, and I’m a voter. I have the same concerns as all of you, and I’m speaking as a citizen, not as a movie star.”7 It’s hard to overestimate his influence on the McCarthy campaign. Eugene McCarthy was the senator from Minnesota. He was popular in his home state, but not particularly well known outside the Midwest. He was challenging Lyndon Johnson, a sitting president, for the nomination of their party. Just four years earlier, Johnson had won the national election with the highest percentage of the popular vote in modern history. It would be an uphill battle, at best.

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But Paul’s active campaigning for McCarthy in the early days of the campaign, especially in New Hampshire, had a profound effect. Crowds and the media followed his appearances. Tony Podesta, then a student working on the McCarthy campaign and Paul’s campaign contact (now a Washington, D.C., lobbyist), recalled how worried he was that the crowds would be small on the day that Paul was to campaign in Claremont, New Hampshire. Instead, more than 2,000 people showed up at the campaign stop to hear Paul Newman declare: “I didn’t come here to help Gene McCarthy. I need McCarthy’s help.” Podesta pointed out, “Until that point, McCarthy was some sort of quack not too many people knew about, but as soon as Paul Newman came to speak for him, he immediately became a national figure.”8 In Ronald Brownstein’s The Power and the Glitter, Podesta explained the McCarthy campaign’s strategy for using Paul Newman: “Once we figured out what was going on here, we began to advance him harder than we advanced the candidate . . . There wasn’t anybody who had the kind of electricity Newman did. We didn’t get those kinds of crowds for McCarthy.”9 There are some political experts who suggest that Paul raised McCarthy’s public profile in New Hampshire enough that he won 42 percent of the popular vote in the primary, to Johnson’s 49 percent. More importantly, McCarthy actually won 20 out of 24 of the New Hampshire delegates to the Democratic Convention. McCarthy’s success in the Granite State, many political analysts believe, encouraged President Johnson, realizing that his party and the country were bitterly divided over the Vietnam War and his prosecution of it, to announce that he would not run for a second term. It opened up the race, with Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey both also deciding to run for president. For nine months, Paul campaigned almost every weekend for McCarthy. He filmed political ads for him and emceed a telethon to raise money for his candidate. Paul was also a delegate from Connecticut for McCarthy to the Democratic Party Convention, held that August in Chicago. While McCarthy did not win the nomination, losing to Hubert Humphrey, Paul would not sit out any elections in the future. One final footnote of the 1968 primary campaign, quintessential Paul Newman, political activist and prankster: “I was campaigning for

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Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy on the weekends. A Jaguar dealer kindly loaned me a car to use every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I learned that [Richard] Nixon was using the same car on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I left a note in it. It read, ‘Dear Mr. Nixon, You should have no trouble driving this car. It has a tricky clutch. Paul Newman.’ ” Richard Nixon, who would go on to win the election of 1968, had been nicknamed “Tricky Dick” by Helen Gahagan Douglas, his 1950 senatorial opponent, because of Nixon’s alleged use of dirty tricks during that campaign.10 Paul’s note would just add more fuel for the fire when President Nixon’s aides began compiling a list of enemies—and Paul was named number 19 on the list! In the memo that accompanied the infamous enemies list, this is the description of Paul Newman: “Radic[al]-lib causes. Heavy McCarthy involvement ’68. Used effectively in nationwide T.V. commercials. ’72 involvement certain.”11 According to John Dean, White House counsel to President Nixon, there was a reprehensible point of the list and the memo that accompanied it: “This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”12 Paul Newman was delighted to be included on the list. As he said, “A man with no enemies is a man with no character.”13 For the rest of his life, Paul would continue to actively back, with his time and money, those political candidates who supported the issues he cared deeply about. While he primarily supported Democratic candidates, he also championed Pete McCloskey, a strong antiwar candidate, who was a Republican running against Richard Nixon in the 1972 primaries. He supported John Anderson, who ran as an independent in the 1980 presidential election. That year, former actor and Republican candidate Ronald Reagan won the presidency. Normally, Paul and Joanne would host an election night party. That year, they decided to screen Reagan’s infamous comedy Bedtime for Bonzo (which involved Reagan acting as a professor testing whether he could teach Bonzo, the chimp, human morals). The guests were given pots and pans (and lots of liquid refreshment)—and were supposed to bang loudly

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whenever Reagan delivered his lines. But as Paul later explained, a pall began to descend over the party as the reality of Reagan’s election took hold. He later told the New York Times, only partly in jest, “The reason I went into the salad-dressing business is because I suddenly realized I needed a different power base. When Reagan became President, I discovered I had been end-played . . . I realized that to be effective I would have to enter the world of business, and this is it. I guess I’ve had more fun doing this than anything else I’ve done in a long time. But remember, it’s really my way of telling Ronald Reagan that his salad days are over.”14 Paul also supported Ralph Nader of the Green Party in the 2000 presidential election. Nader, many political analysts insist, served as a spoiler for the election because some liberals who would have traditionally supported the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, instead voted for Nader. In the very close 2000 election, especially in counting the contested Florida vote, Nader’s impact was significant. In 2008, prior to his death that September, Paul had already donated to the Obama campaign the maximum amount an individual can give to a political candidate (as had Joanne Woodward). Paul was also a strong, vocal support of gay rights, including samesex marriage. As he explained, “From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being . . . by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”15 Paul’s liberal politics extended into different arenas. In 1996, he invested $1 million in The Nation, the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in America, to keep it afloat. The publication describes itself as “the flagship of the left.” In exchange, he asked that he be allowed to occasionally write essays on issues he considered important. Generally, these pieces were written tongue-in-cheek. For example, he wrote a parody of then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Paul was angered by the Speaker’s suggestion that Hollywood liberals underwrite the government’s National Endowment for the Arts by

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donating 1 percent of their gross income. He sometimes contributed playful line drawings, illustrating something in the news. Despite all those western movies he starred in, Paul was a longtime supporter of gun control and a member of Handgun Control Inc. (later renamed the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence), an organization dedicated to “enact and enforce sensible gun laws, regulations, and public policies through grassroots activism, electing public officials who support gun laws, and increasing public awareness of gun violence.”16 It is ironic that one of Paul’s good friends in the early part of his career, Charlton Heston, a fellow actor who starred in Ben Hur and who had accompanied Paul on civil rights marches, would later serve as president of the National Rifle Association, which is committed to the promotion of firearm ownership. Paul was also deeply committed to halting nuclear proliferation. He wrote letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, and narrated a TV documentary on the consequences of even a limited nuclear war. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter asked Paul to serve as a public delegate at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Disarmament. He was paid $5,000 plus living expenses—unnecessary since he owned a New York City apartment. He kept a low profile, studied hard, and spoke only once, unimpressive in his delivery, but sincere in his beliefs. In a Rolling Stone interview, Paul described his presidential encounter after his White House briefing with one of President Carter’s national security advisors: “I was just walking down the hall, and [President] Carter came out of a door. And we just bumped into each other. He said, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” and invited Paul into the Oval Office. The conversation didn’t go as Paul had hoped. “I wanted to talk to him about SALT II [armament control talks between the United States and Russia], and he wanted to talk about how you made movies. What made me pick the roles I picked? How long did it take to make a movie? What was the time it took to put the movie together after you finish shooting?” In the end, Paul summarized his presidential encounter: “I spent about fifteen minutes with Carter in the Oval Office. God, I was uncomfortable. But that’s my problem, not his.”17 Paul and Charlton Heston agreed to a one-on-one debate on nuclear disarmament. Paul was well prepared and had copious notes. He knew

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Actor Paul Newman, a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, is shown at his UN office on June 3, 1978, during an interview with the Associated Press discussing his efforts to help focus world attention on the need to scale down the global arms race. Newman said it was tragic that the opening of a gambling casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, seemed to be getting more news media coverage than the first worldwide disarmament conference since 1932. AP Photo/Carlos Rene Perez.

his material, but as he did with most political speeches, he referred frequently to his research. The effect was wooden and stodgy. Heston was a much better debater, able to speak extemporaneously, recall facts easily, and recount them in a relaxed manner. Paul was disappointed and angry with his own performance and with Heston, whom he believed had been deliberately provocative in the debate, comparing those who advocated a nuclear freeze to Europeans who tried to appease Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. The following year, Paul refused to permit Heston to participate in a Scott Newman Foundation fund-raiser. Several times in his life, Paul was encouraged to run for office. He steadfastly refused, saying, “I just don’t think I have the equipment . . . I think I carry my credentials about as far as they can go by supporting those who are qualified for office . . . I just don’t have the temperament. I’d get too impatient with all the machinery. And I’ve got too short a fuse to survive the ordeal of a campaign.”18

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NOTES 1. Lax, Eric. Newman. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1996, 149. 2. Latham, Aaron. “Paul Newman Takes the Stand.” Rolling Stone (January 20, 1983), http://www.rollingstone.com/. 3. Lewis, Richard Warren. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (July 1968), http://www.playboy.com/articles/paul-newman-1968interview/index.html. 4. Latham, “Paul Newman Takes the Stand.” 5. “4 Actors Rebuffed in Alabama Deny ‘Rabble-Rousing’ Charge.” New York Times (August 24, 1963), 10. 6. Lewis. “Playboy Interview.” 7. Oumano, Elena. Paul Newman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, 180. 8. Pop History Dig. “1968 Presidential Race: Democrats.” Pophistorydig.com, http://www.pophistorydig.com/?p=533. 9. Brownstein, Ronald. The Power and The Glitter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990, 235. 10. Oumano, Paul Newman, 181. 11. Levy, Paul Newman, 254. 12. Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network. “Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History [Featured Program].” Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network Web site, http://www.cpbn.org/program/watergate-plus-30shadow-history. 13. Lewis, “Playboy Interview.” 14. Sheraton, Mimi. “Newman’s Salad Dressing: Oil, Vinegar and Ballyhoo.” New York Times (September 15, 1982), C1. 15. Greenberg, Peter S. “Playboy Interview.” Playboy (April, 1983), http://www.playboy.com/articles/1983-interview-with-paul-newman. 16. Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “Home Page.” Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, http://bradycampaign.org/. 17. Latham, “Paul Newman Takes the Stand.” 18. Lewis, “Playboy Interview.”

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Chapter 11

THE FINAL YEARS

Life for Paul Newman irrevocably changed after the death of his son Scott in 1978. He was still the self-described terrier determined to succeed. He had a wife and five daughters he adored. He had the financial wherewithal to travel when and where he wanted, as well as support the candidates and causes in which he believed. His food business had succeeded far beyond all expectations, and he (and Hotch) enjoyed giving every penny of profits to charities. He was still lucky, pursuing a second career as a race-car driver, frequently winning. He was still making movies but was much more selective in his choices. That didn’t mean that he always had a box-office winner. He frequently didn’t. But he made conscious decisions about why he wanted to play a role or work on a film project. The roles were usually darker and more realistic. Even in his seventies and eighties, Paul was a good-looking man. If he no longer had the Greek Adonis face of his youth, he still had the blue eyes that could mesmerize, the smile that was enchanting, and the talent to make the audience believe in whatever character he played. He was finally getting the kinds of character actor parts he had always wanted.

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In The Verdict, released in 1982, Paul played Frank Galvin, an alcoholic, ambulance-chasing lawyer who chooses to fight, rather than settle, a medical malpractice case. He wants to punish the guilty who, through negligence, left a young woman in a permanent coma. He wants to help the patient’s family who must live with the results of this medical malpractice. And, he hopes that in the process, he will salvage his own self-esteem. There is nothing pretty about Frank Galvin. As Roger Ebert said in his review: “Frank Galvin provides Newman with the occasion for one of his great performances. This is the first movie in which Newman has looked a little old, a little tired. There are moments when his face sags and his eyes seem terribly weary, and we can look ahead clearly to the old men he will be playing in 10 years’ time. Newman always has been an interesting actor, but sometimes his resiliency, his youthful vitality, have obscured his performances; he has a tendency to always look great, and that is not always what the role calls for. This time, he gives us old, bone-tired, hung-over, trembling (and heroic) Frank Galvin, and we buy it lock, stock and shot glass.”1 Once again, Paul was nominated for an Oscar but lost to Ben Kingsley in Ghandi. In 1984, Paul committed to a very personal motion picture, Harry & Son. The story pitted a blue-collar dad against his bookish, sensitive son. The picture had the tagline, “They’re two men with nothing in common. They’re father and son.” He came to the movie the same way he’d come to Rachel, Rachel, through Joanne. She had seen the screenplay by Ronald Buck, which had already made the rounds of many actors, with no success, and thought she would be perfect for the role of the next-door neighbor with an unrequited crush on Harry. Paul read it and asked to direct. It took two years and many rewrites, with Paul eventually getting coauthor credit for the film. But like Rachel, Rachel, he couldn’t get any of the studios or producers interested.2 This time, in order to get studio backing, Paul agreed to star in the film, as well as direct it. He had done that once before, in Sometimes a Great Notion (1970), but he had been dissatisfied with the result. So this time, Paul asked Joanne to act as a director surrogate when he was acting. Joanne had some directing experience, having helmed Come Along with Me, a television film in 1982. In retrospect, it didn’t work.

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Joanne didn’t feel comfortable asserting herself, and Paul had trouble delegating responsibility. The question is how much of the movie about an estranged father and son was about Paul’s feelings over the loss of his son Scott. Ronald Buck insists that while writing the script, Paul never once referred to his son. But the coauthor also added, “How could Paul not think of him? He had to be drawing on that experience.”3 But in promoting the film, Paul refused to even discuss the issue. To one interviewer, he was blunt: “You can’t fictionalize grief.”4 Eric Lax, in his biography Newman, suggests that Paul more likely drew upon his frustrated and unfulfilled relationship with his own father, Arthur Newman.5 Harry & Son was not well received by either the critics or the public. Roger Ebert’s review could barely contain his scorn: “This movie looks like the aftermath of an explosion in the story department. It’s about everything. They give us so many relationships, so many problems, so many emotional hazards, so many colorful characters, we need a batterylighted ballpoint, so we can take notes in the dark.”6 Despite the poor reviews of Harry & Son, on March 24, 1986, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Paul an honorary Oscar “in recognition of his many and memorable and compelling screen performances and for his personal integrity and dedication to his craft.”7 Paul wasn’t able to attend the awards ceremony because he was in Chicago filming The Color of Money. He gave his acceptance speech via satellite. Paul costarred with Tom Cruise in The Color of Money, which was directed by Martin Scorsese. It was a sequel to The Hustler. Paul again played Fast Eddie, now 30 years older, who, having been forced into retirement by gangsters, emerges to coach the new, young hotshot pool player Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise). In the process, Fast Eddie regains his own self-respect. The critics and audience loved the movie and adored Paul Newman. As Washington Post critic Paul Attanasio wrote: “What you see in that close-up, that single look of Newman’s, is everything that’s happened to Fast Eddie since ‘The Hustler’ began. Here is one of those Zen-like performances in which a veteran actor distills an entire life into an attitude. Newman’s confidence in his own instincts gives Fast Eddie a remarkable gravity, so that Newman can accomplish

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with the slightest of intonations, or the choice of a simple prop (like the tinted glasses he wears), or an almost indetectable shift in his eyes, what would take another actor the course of a movie to attain.”8 In this movie, Paul Newman isn’t the pretty face on screen. As critic Attanasio points out, “You can also sense Scorsese playing with Newman’s and Cruise’s off-screen personas, as he cuts in a supertight close-up from yesterday’s matinee idol to today’s, and their blue eyes collide like billiard balls.”9 The movie grossed more than $52 million. Paul was again nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor in a Leading Role. On March 30, 1987, 32 years after his first screen appearance in The Silver Chalice, the movie he thought would end his acting career, Paul Leonard Newman won the Academy Award. But he was not in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept the gold statue. Instead, director Robert Wise accepted on his behalf. When asked why he wasn’t there, Paul quipped, “It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m tired.’ ”10 In 1990, Paul again costarred with his wife, this time in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Once again, it was Joanne who found the material. She had read the two novels on which the screenplay would be based. In 1986, she had seen and loved the movie A Room with a View and met the director James Ivory and his producing partner, Ismail Merchant. She hoped that they could find a project to work on together and mentioned the Bridge novels. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a long-time collaborator of Merchant-Ivory, agreed to adapt the books for screen. Once they read the screenplay, Paul and Joanne signed on to play the leads. Paul could see echoes of his childhood in Shaker Heights in the story. As he told a New York Times reporter, “You could describe the story as being about absolutely nothing, but it’s really about absolutely everything. It’s about life and love and the family, but the scenes would appear to be about absolutely nothing.” He was intrigued by the way the story would be told: “It’s not so much that the role appealed to me. This is really a very special film, because it is accomplished by splashing essences of scenes, telling a story with a head-on impression followed by a glancing impression, and in the end coming away with a whole painting. More than anything else, that way of making a film appealed

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to me.”11 He admitted that choosing to do Mr. and Mrs. Bridge was deliberate and part of his approach in recent years to acting. He laughed that he had made a series of “perverse choices,” choosing the interesting character rather than the big screen romantic lead. For Paul, making Mr. and Mrs. Bridge had the added advantage of being able to work with his wife: “We spend a lot of time doing social things, political things, family things. To work together professionally is comforting somehow.”12 In that same interview, Paul added that there was no competition between them, as far as acting goes, saying, “I think we’re competitive about who makes the tea at night, but I don’t think we’re competitive about acting . . . I’m pretty vulnerable to her, and the things that she does just trigger things in me.” In his biography of Paul Newman, Shawn Levy reports that Joanne believed that Mr. Bridge “was the nearest role Newman ever played to his own true self.” Although Paul disagreed, in fact, when he described Walter Bridge, he was close to describing himself: “Walter Bridge is a man of extraordinary ethical and moral values. A patriot. He has great loyalties. He adores his wife, and he’s disturbed by the fact that he isn’t more outgoing and can’t tell her how much he adores her.”13 The movie received mixed reviews, although almost all the critics praised the acting of both Paul and Joanne. During the awards season, Joanne was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award. The movie won the best picture at the Venice Film Festival. But it was primarily seen as an art film, rather than as a commercial success. After Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Paul took off another three years before making another movie. In 1994, Paul returned to the screen as Sully Sullivan in Nobody’s Fool, revisiting again the theme of the inaccessible father and the estranged son. It was directed by Robert Benton, who also wrote the screenplay. He told Newman biographer Eric Lax that Nobody’s Fool is “about a man who has come to terms with his own life, and Paul, who says he has been extraordinarily fortunate, has also had an enormous struggle. What the struggle is, I don’t know . . . But I do believe that Paul figured it out and used his life.”14 Paul acknowledged that Sully had special meaning for him: “There’s a lot of the character that is closer to me than any role I’ve done . . . In

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his search for privacy, he starts putting up walls, and the unfortunate part of the process is at some point these walls break down. I’ve been there, and I know what it’s like.”15 Paul is in virtually every scene of the movie. The filming was done piecemeal in order to accommodate other actors’ schedules. According to Bruce Willis, the chance to work with Paul Newman was enough for him to sign on to the cast without reading the script. But this piecemeal production meant that the beginning and end of the film were shot during the first two weeks of production—and the meat of the father-son story wasn’t filmed until the movie was almost done. You needed a peerless professional like Paul Newman to handle the constant shifts in storyline and emotions. In an interview with Lax, Paul insists, “Sully was a lot of luck . . . Everything was shot out of continuity. Even though you have the benefit of some rehearsal, still scenes were rewritten and scenes that you had rehearsed were lifted out and scenes that hadn’t been written were put in . . . That’s why I say, I think there was a lot of instinct, and maybe that’s what forty years of films does: that you’re really running on pure gall and something intuitive.”16 The critics were in agreement. Nobody’s Fool and, specifically, Paul Newman were outstanding. Roger Ebert wrote a touching review: I have been watching Paul Newman in movies all of my life. He is so much a part of the landscape of modern American film that sometimes he is almost invisible: He does what he does with simplicity, grace and a minimum of fuss, and so I wonder if people even realize what a fine actor he is . . . He is an exact contemporary of Marlon Brando, who is said to have invented modern film acting. Yes, and he probably did, stripping it of the mannerisms of the past and creating a hypercharged realism. Like Brando, Newman studied the Method. Like Brando, Newman looked good in an undershirt. Unlike Brando, Newman went on to study life, and so while Brando broke through and then wandered aimlessly in inexplicable roles (especially since ‘The Godfather’ 20 years ago), Newman continued to work on his craft. Having seen what he could put in, he went on to see what he could leave out. In ‘Nobody’s Fool,’ he has it just about figured out.17

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Paul was again nominated for an Oscar but lost to Tom Hanks in Forest Gump. He again didn’t bother to attend the awards show. The film did almost $40 million in business. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences wasn’t done with Paul yet. In 1994, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charitable works. He was nominated again in 2003, this time for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Road to Perdition. In 2002, Paul again returned to the theater, his first appearance on stage since his appearance in Baby Want a Kiss in 1964. While promoting Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Joanne spoke of her fervent wish that Paul

Actor Paul Newman poses with the Oscar statuette after he is honored with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 66th annual Academy Awards show at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, California, on March 21, 1994. AP Photo/Douglas Pizac.

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return to the theater: “My biggest regret is that Paul stopped appearing on stage because he was a wonderful theater actor.” But Paul, at that time, was unsure if he could return to the stage. He said, “I don’t know whether I could go back to the theater in a significant part. I’ve gotten paranoid about learning lines.”18 But when he finally did return, the choice of play was poignant: Our Town by Thornton Wilder, a quintessential American play on mortality. In the early part of his career, Paul had appeared as George Gibbs, the young husband, in a 1955 television production with Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager. The sweet irony of the play is not lost on the audience. Paul, now the Stage Manager (narrator), says: “You know how it is. You’re 21 or 22, and you make some decisions. Then, boom! You’re 70.” Actually, Paul was 77. This production of the show opened the 2002 summer season of the Westport Country Playhouse, in his hometown. Joanne Woodward was then the Playhouse’s artistic director. After a successful run in Westport, the show was moved to the Booth Theater on Broadway for a nine-week run. Paul was clear about his motives: “I decided I would not go to my grave without coming back to Broadway.”19 He refused to let the play be a star vehicle and insisted that his name be listed alphabetically with the rest of the cast. When the play moved to Broadway, Paul received the first Tony nomination of his career. He informed the producers of the Tony Awards show that he would not be attending, insisting that not only did he stay away from awards shows, he no longer owned a tuxedo. The following year, PBS and Showtime showed a taping of the performance, and Paul received an Emmy nomination. In 2004 and 2005, Paul made a major decision. He was getting older and began to plan for what would happen to Newman’s Own and his charitable foundation. He transferred his partnership stake in the business to the Newman’s Own Foundation. It was effectively a charitable donation that was worth almost $117 million. In 2006, audiences saw, or more precisely heard, a different side of Paul Newman. Paul was the voice of Doc Hudson, an animated 1951 Hudson Hornet, in the Pixar feature Cars. It would be the last feature film of his life. It also turned out to be the highest-grossing movie of his career.

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Life started to slow down. He hired professionals to run Newman’s Own, but he still continued to follow his racing team around to the tracks. He even, at age 82, raced at Lime Rock. And he enjoyed his new role, Pop-Pop to his grandsons, Peter and Henry. They were the offspring of Lissy and her husband, Rafe. He saw them often as they lived in the original Newman house, on the opposite side of a drawbridge suspended across the Aspetuck River from the home that Joanne and Paul had built. He would take the boys for pizza and trick-or-treating on Halloween.20 In May 2007, at the age of 82, in an interview on Good Morning America, Paul announced he was retiring from acting because he could no longer perform to the best of his ability: “I’m not able to work any

Actor and race-car driver Paul Newman gets out of his car after testing it on the track at Lime Rock Park Race Track in Lime Rock, Connecticut, on September 27, 2005. AP Photo/Bob Child.

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more as an actor at the level that I would want to. You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So I think that’s pretty much a closed book for me. I’ve been doing it for 50 years. That’s enough.”21 He was drained of energy, having trouble breathing. After much testing, Paul Newman was diagnosed with lung cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy followed. Always a private man, Paul released no information to the media, insisting he was “doing nicely” when asked about his condition.22 He also quipped, “I’m being treated for athlete’s foot and hair loss.”23 On January 26, 2008, Paul celebrated his 83rd birthday. The real celebration was two days later, when Paul and Joanne celebrated their 50th anniversary. It had been a marriage that many found hard to understand. The two seemed like complete opposites: he loved auto racing, she loved the ballet. They spent months apart when he would be on location filming or following the racing circuit. And yet, he once answered the question of why he was faithful to his wife with the quip, “I have steak at home; Why go out for hamburger?”24 Joanne was equally clear about the attraction after so many years: “Sexiness wears thin after awhile and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that’s a real treat!”25 The truth was that they supported each other’s dreams. Hotch, a guest at the anniversary party, revealed in his book Paul and Me that Paul looked into his wife’s eyes and declared, “Joanne, being married to you has been the joy of my life.”26 Paul had agreed to direct Of Mice and Men for the 2008 fall season of the Westport Country Playhouse. It was to be his professional directorial stage debut. But in May of that year, he withdrew citing health issues. He also withdrew from two races he had scheduled at Lime Rock. In August 2008, when the cancer returned and treatment seemed futile, Paul insisted he was through with chemotherapy and wanted to go home, to Westport, to die. He saw old friends like Hotch and Redford. Everyone knew these visits were final farewells, but the conversations were light and focused on happier times. Paul made two special trips that month. He went to Lime Rock Park where he began his racing career. The track was closed to the public for a few hours, and Paul drove

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the Corvette that his team hoped he would have raced that previous spring. Joanne and his daughters followed him around the track in their Volvo station wagon. Later in the month, he visited for the last time the original Hole in the Wall Camp in Ashford, Connecticut. According to Camp Director Ray Lamontagne, “All of a sudden, Paul looked up with the look of joy on his face. He said, ‘I can still hear the laughter of the children.’ ”27 On September 26, 2008, at home, surrounded by his children, and holding the hand of his wife, Paul Leonard Newman quietly passed away. His will and the codicil he added in July before his death reflected the kind of man Paul Newman was in life. He left his Oscars and other theatrical prizes to his charitable foundation. He directed that his race cars and airplanes were to be sold with proceeds going to a trust he created. The Westport estate and his personal effects were left to Joanne. Other business assets went to trusts established to benefit his wife. One interesting point in the will is that he left his intellectual property rights to the charitable foundation. He urged the executors of his estate to be vigilant about protecting his image and intellectual rights to prevent uses he “did not approve during my lifetime.” He was explicit that his likeness never be used to promote foods of a lesser quality than Newman’s Own current roster. These directives were in response to concerns Paul had that he was one of those celebrities that a future producer, employing new technology, might use to create performances that had never occurred. In the will, he insisted he would want nothing to do with any “virtual performance or reanimation of any performance by me by the use of any technique, technology or medium now in existence or which may be known or created in the future anywhere in the universe.”28 After his death, Paul’s five daughters issued a statement that captured the heart of this man: Paul Newman played many unforgettable roles. But the ones for which he was proudest never had top billing on the marquee. Devoted husband. Loving father. Adoring grandfather. Dedicated philanthropist.

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PAUL NEWMAN

Our father was a rare symbol of selfless humility, the last to acknowledge what he was doing was special. Intensely private, he quietly succeeded beyond measure in impacting the lives of so many with his generosity. Always and to the end, Dad was incredibly grateful for his good fortune. In his own words: “It’s been a privilege to be here.” He will be profoundly missed by those whose lives he touched, but he leaves us with extraordinary inspiration to draw upon.29

NOTES 1. Ebert, Roger. “The Verdict.” Chicago Sun-Times (January 1, 1982), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19820101/ REVIEWS/201010351/1023. 2. Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009, 351. 3. Ibid. 4. Lax, Eric. Newman. Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1996, 163. 5. Ibid. 6. Ebert, Roger. “Harry & Son.” Chicago Sun-Times (January 1, 1984). 7. Associated Press. “Acting Legend Paul Newman Dies at 83,” http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26913988. 8. Attanasio, Paul. “The Color of Money.” Washington Post (October 17, 1986), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/ movies/videos/thecolorofmoneyrattanasio_a0ad63.htm. 9. Ibid. 10. Smith, Lynn. “Actor Paul Newman dies at 83.” The Envelope, http:// theenvelope.latimes.com/news/la-me-newman28-2008sep28,0,4739114. story. 11. Rother, Larry. “Crossing the Bridges with the Newmans.” New York Times (November 18, 1990), H13. 12. Ibid. 13. Levy, Paul Newman, 388–89. 14. Lax, Newman, 173. 15. Levy, Paul Newman, 396. 16. Lax, Newman, 175–76.

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17. Ebert, Roger. “Nobody’s Fool.” Chicago Sun-Times (January 13, 1995), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/ 19950113/REVIEWS/501130303/1023. 18. Rother, “Crossing the Bridges with the Newmans,” H13. 19. Pogrebin, Robin. “An Evening of American Classics.” New York Times (December 1, 2002), A1, A8. 20. “Paul Newman Dead at 83.” WestportNow, http://www.westport now.com/index.php?/v2/comments/21498/. 21. “Paul Newman Announces Retirement.” Contactmusic.com Web site. http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/paul-newmanannounces-retirement_1032247. 22. “Paul Newman Dead at 83.” WestportNow. 23. Bosworth, Patricia. “The Newman Chronicles.” Vanity Fair (September 2008), http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/09/ newman200809. 24. Lewis, Richard Warren. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (July 1968), http://www.playboy.com/articles/paul-newman1968-interview/index.html. 25. Stritof, Sheri, and Bob Stritof. “Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward Marriage Profile.” About.com, http://marriage.about.com/ od/entertainmen1/p/paulnewman.htm. 26. Hotchner, A. E. Paul and Me. New York: Doubleday, 2010, 223. 27. Levy, Paul Newman, 440. 28. Cowan, Alison Leigh. “Paul Newman, Philanthropist, Does Hereby Leave . . .” New York Times (November 26, 2008), http://city room.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/paul-newman-philanthropistdoes-hereby-leave/?scp=1-b&sq=&st=nyt. 29. “Paul Newman Dead at 83.” WestportNow.

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APPENDIX: WORKS OF SCREEN

ACTOR Mater and the Ghostlight (2006) (V) (voice). . . . Doc Hudson Cars (2006) (voice). . . . Doc Hudson Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D (2005) (voice). . . . Dave Scott Empire Falls (2005) (TV). . . . Max Roby Our Town (2003) (TV). . . . Stage Manager Freedom: A History of Us. . . . Justice Earl Warren / . . . (2 episodes, 2003) — “Democracy and Struggles” (2003) TV episode. . . . Justice Earl Warren — “Safe for Democracy” (2003) TV episode. . . . Woodrow Wilson Road to Perdition (2002). . . . John Rooney Where the Money Is (2000). . . . Henry Message in a Bottle (1999). . . . Dodge Blake Twilight (1998). . . . Harry Ross

116

APPENDIX

Nobody’s Fool (1994). . . . Sully Sullivan The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). . . . Sidney J. Mussburger Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990). . . . Walter Bridge Blaze (1989). . . . Gov. Earl K. Long Fat Man and Little Boy (1989). . . . Gen. Leslie R. Groves The Color of Money (1986). . . . Fast Eddie Felson Harry & Son (1984). . . . Harry Keach The Verdict (1982). . . . Frank Galvin Come Along with Me (1982) (TV) (voice) (as P. L. Newman) . . . . Hughie Absence of Malice (1981). . . . Gallagher Fort Apache the Bronx (1981). . . . Murphy When Time Ran Out (1980). . . . Hank Anderson Quintet (1979). . . . Essex Slap Shot (1977). . . . Reggie “Reg” Dunlop Great Performances: Dance in America. . . . Narrator (1 episode, 1976) Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976). . . . The Star (William “Buffalo Bill” Cody) The Drowning Pool (1975). . . . Harper The Towering Inferno (1974). . . . Doug Roberts The Sting (1973). . . . Henry Gondorff The MacKintosh Man (1973). . . . Rearden The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). . . . Judge Roy Bean Pocket Money (1972). . . . Jim Kane Sometimes a Great Notion (1970). . . . Hank Stamper WUSA (1970). . . . Rheinhardt Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). . . . Butch Cassidy Winning (1969). . . . Frank Capua The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968). . . . Pvt. Harry Frigg Cool Hand Luke (1967). . . . Luke Hombre (1967). . . . John Russell Torn Curtain (1966). . . . Professor Michael Armstrong Harper (1966). . . . Lew Harper Lady L (1965). . . . Armand Denis The Outrage (1964). . . . Juan Carrasco What a Way to Go! (1964). . . . Larry Flint

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117

The Prize (1963). . . . Andrew Craig A New Kind of Love (1963). . . . Steve Sherman Hud (1963). . . . Hud Bannon Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962). . . . The Battler Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). . . . Chance Wayne Paris Blues (1961). . . . Ram Bowen The Hustler (1961). . . . Eddie Felson Exodus (1960). . . . Ari Ben Canaan From the Terrace (1960). . . . David Alfred Eaton The Young Philadelphians (1959). . . . Anthony Judson Lawrence / Narrator Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! (1958). . . . Harry Bannerman Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). . . . Brick Pollitt The Left-Handed Gun (1958). . . . Billy the Kid The Long, Hot Summer (1958). . . . Ben Quick Playhouse 90. . . . Christian Darling (1 episode, 1958) — “The 80 Yard Run” (1958) TV episode. . . . Christian Darling Until They Sail (1957). . . . Capt. Jack Harding The Helen Morgan Story (1957). . . . Larry Maddux The Kaiser Aluminum Hour. . . . Charlie Correlli / . . . (2 episodes, 1956) — “The Rag Jungle” (1956) TV episode. . . . Charlie Correlli — “The Army Game” (1956) TV episode. . . . Danny Scott The Rack (1956). . . . Capt. Edward W. Hall Jr. The United States Steel Hour. . . . Giorgio / . . . (3 episodes, 1954– 1956) — “Bang the Drum Slowly” (1956) TV episode. . . . Henry Wiggen — “The Five Fathers of Pepi” (1956) TV episode. . . . Giorgio — “The Rise and Fall of Silas Lapham” (1954) TV episode. . . . Tom Corey Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). . . . Rocky Playwrights ’56. . . . The Battler (1 episode, 1955) Producers’ Showcase. . . . George Gibbs (1 episode, 1955) — “Our Town” (1955) TV episode. . . . George Gibbs

118

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The Philco Television Playhouse. . . . Billy the Kid (1 episode, 1955) — “The Death of Billy the Kid” (1955) TV episode. . . . Billy the Kid Appointment with Adventure. . . . Mack (2 episodes, 1955) — “Honeymoon in Spain” (1955) TV episode — “Five in Judgment” (1955) TV episode. . . . Mack The Silver Chalice (1954). . . . Basil Danger (1 episode, 1954) — “Knife in the Dark” (1954) TV episode Armstrong Circle Theatre. . . . Jimmy Polo (1 episode, 1954) — “The Contender” (1954) TV episode. . . . Jimmy Polo Goodyear Television Playhouse (2 episodes, 1954) — “Thunder of Silence” (1954) TV episode — “Guilty Is the Stranger” (1954) TV episode The Mask (1 episode, 1954) — “The Party Night” (1954) TV episode The Joe Palooka Story. . . . Fight Spectator (1 episode, 1954) — “The Big Blow-Off ” (1954) TV episode (uncredited). . . . Fight Spectator The Web. . . . Alex (4 episodes, 1952–1953) — “The Leech” (1953) TV episode. . . . Alex — “One for the Road” (1953) TV episode. . . . Alex — “The Bells of Damon” (1953) TV episode. . . . Alex — “Deadlock” (1952) TV episode. . . . Alex You Are There. . . . (3 episodes, 1953) — “The Fate of Nathan Hale (September 22, 1776)” (1953) TV episode. . . . Nathan Hale

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119

— “The Death of Socrates (399 B.C.)” (1953) TV episode. . . . Plato — “The Assassination of Julius Caesar (March 15, 44 B.C.)” (1953) TV episode The Aldrich Family (1949) TV series. . . . Occasional Cast Member (1952–1953) Suspense. . . . Capt. Radetski (1 episode, 1952) — “Woman in Love” (1952) TV episode. . . . Capt. Radetski Tales of Tomorrow. . . . Sergeant Wilson (1 episode, 1952) — “Ice from Space” (1952) TV episode. . . . Sergeant Wilson

PRODUCER Lucky Days (2008) (producer emeritus) Empire Falls (2005) (TV) (executive producer) Harry & Son (1984) (producer) The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) (producer) The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) (co-executive producer) (uncredited) They Might Be Giants (1971) (producer) Sometimes a Great Notion (1970) (co-executive producer) WUSA (1970) (producer) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) (co-executive producer) (uncredited) Winning (1969) (co-executive producer) (uncredited) Rachel, Rachel (1968) (producer)

DIRECTOR The Glass Menagerie (1987) Harry & Son (1984) The Shadow Box (1980) (TV) The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972)

120

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Sometimes a Great Notion (1970) Rachel, Rachel (1968)

WRITER Harry & Son (1984) (cowriter)

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS Hotchner, A. E. Paul and Me. New York: Doubleday, 2010. Lax, Eric. Newman. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1996. Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009. Mordden, Ethan. Medium Cool. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Morella, Joe, and Edward Z. Epstein. Paul and Joanne. New York: Delacorte, 1989. Newman, Paul, and A. E. Hotchner. Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good: The Madcap Business Adventure of the Truly Oddest Couple. New York: Random House, 2003. O’Brien, Daniel. Paul Newman. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Oumano, Elena. Paul Newman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

MAGAZINE ARTICLES AND WEB SITES Adler, Renata. “ ‘Rachel, Rachel,’ Portrait of a Spinster.” New York Times (August 27, 1968), 36. Atkinson, Brooks. “The Guests Came from Jail: Family is Held Captive in ‘Desperate Hours’.” New York Times (February 11, 1955), 20.

122

SELECTED BIBLIOGR APHY

Atkinson, Brooks. “ ‘Picnic’ Revisited: Life in a Kansas Community Honestly Drawn in William Inge’s New Play.” New York Times (August 30, 1953), X1. Atkinson, Brooks. “Portrait of Corruption.” New York Times (March 11, 1959), 39. Attanasio, Paul. “The Color of Money.” Washington Post (October 17, 1986), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/ thecolorofmoneyrattanasio_a0ad63.htm. Barthel, Joan. “Paul Newman: How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” New York Times (October 22, 1967), 133. Baxter, Brian. “Paul Newman: Obituary.” MediaGuardian.co.uk (September 27, 2008), http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/27/paulnewman.usa1. Berkow, Ira. “Role of Racer Satisfies Newman’s Competitive Side,” New York Times (December 23, 1985), http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/23/ sports/role-of-racer-satisfies-newman-s-competitive-side.html. Billington, Michael. “The Thinking Man’s Outdoor Hero.” Times (February 8, 1969). Bogdanovich, Peter. “Is That Ticking (Pause) a Bomb?” New York Times (April 11, 1999), AR15. Bosworth, Patricia. “The Newman Chronicles.” Vanity Fair (September 2008), http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/09/newman200809. “Building a Camp for Sick Children.” New York Times (April 5, 1987), 47. Canby, Vincent. “Confidence Men Are Heroes of ‘Sting.’ ” New York Times (December 26, 1973), 60. Canby, Vincent. “Hitchcock On Job Selling New Film.” New York Times (July 7, 1966), 30. Canby, Vincent. “Slapstick and Drama Cross Paths in ‘Butch Cassidy.’ ” New York Times (September 25, 1969), 54. Corliss, Richard. “Remembering Paul Newman, Humanitarian and Actor.” Time (September 27, 2008), http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/ 0,8599,1845133,00.html. Cowan, Alison Leigh. “Paul Newman, Philanthropist, Does Hereby Leave . . .” New York Times (November 26, 2008), http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes. com/2008/11/26/paul-newman-philanthropist-does-hereby-leave/? scp=1-b&sq=&st=nyt. Crowther, Bosley. “An Able Hombre.” New York Times (March 22, 1967), 41. Crowther, Bosley. “Forceful Portrait of a Man Born to Lose.” New York Times (November 2, 1967), 58.

SELECTED BIBLIOGR APHY

123

Crowther, Bosley. “The Fur Flies in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ ” New York Times (September 19, 1953), 24. Crowther, Bosley. “ ‘Hud’ Chronicles a Selfish, Snarling Heel.” New York Times (May 29, 1963), 26. Crowther, Bosley. “The Long Hot Summer.” New York Times (April 4, 1958), 16. Crowther, Bosley. “Paul Newman in ‘Harper’ Evokes Bogart.” New York Times (March 31, 1966), 43. Crowther, Bosley. “Review of ‘The Hustler.’ ” New York Times (September 27, 1961), 35. Dowd, Maureen. “Testing Himself.” New York Times Magazine (September 28, 1986), SM16. Ebert, Roger. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Chicago Sun-Times (October 13, 1969), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article? AID=/19691013/REVIEWS/910130301/1023. Ebert, Roger. “Cool Hand Luke.” Chicago Sun-Times (December 3, 1967), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19671203/ REVIEWS/712030301/1023 Ebert, Roger. “Harry & Son.” Chicago Sun-Times (January 1, 1984), http:// rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19840101/ REVIEWS/401010344/1023. Ebert, Roger. “Hombre.” Chicago Sun-Times (April 21, 1967) http://rogerebert.sun times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19670421/REVIEWS/704210301 Ebert, Roger. “The Hustler.” Chicago Sun-Times (June 23, 2002), http://roger ebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020623/ REVIEWS08/206230301/1023. Ebert, Roger. “Newman’s Complaint.” Esquire (September 1969), 11. Ebert, Roger. “Nobody’s Fool.” Chicago Sun-Times (January 13, 1995), http://roger ebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19950113/ REVIEWS/501130303/1023. Ebert, Roger. “The Sting.” Chicago Sun-Times (December 27, 1973), http:// rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19731227/ REVIEWS/312270301/1023. Ebert, Roger. “The Verdict.” Chicago Sun-Times (January 1, 1982). http:// rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19820101/ REVIEWS/201010351/1023. Ebert, Roger. “Winning.” Chicago Sun-Times (May 20, 1969), http://rogerebert. suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19690520/REVIEWS/ 905200301/1023.

124

SELECTED BIBLIOGR APHY

“4 Actors Rebuffed in Alabama Deny ‘Rabble-Rousing’ Charge.” New York Times (August 24, 1963), 10. Gabler, Neal. “Paul Newman: The Man Who Defined Being a Man.” Men’s Journal (November 12, 2008), http://www.mensjournal.com/paul-newman/3. Gordon, Gow. “Involvement.” Films and Filming (March 1973), 13. Greenberg, Peter S. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (April 1983), http://www.playboy.com/articles/1983-interview-with-paul-newman. Griffin, Nancy. “Newman’s Luck.” AARP (May & June 2005), http://www. aarp.org/politics-society/newsmakers/info-2005/newmans_luck/. Groberg, Dan. “Paul Newman ’49.” The Kenyon Collegian (October 2, 2008), http://media.www.kenyoncollegian.com/media/storage/paper821/ news/2008/10/02/News/Paul-Newman.49-3466999.shtml. Gross, Jane. “Paul Newman, Race Driver.” New York Times (July 2, 1979), C8. Higham, Charles. “Paul Newman Gets High on Speed.” New York Times (April 18, 1971), D17. Hirschberg, Lynn. “Has Paul Newman Finally Grown Up?” New York (December 12, 1994), 37–45. “Hollywood & Politics: 1968 Presidential Race.” Pophistorydig.com, http:// www.pophistorydig.com/?p=533. Kakutani, Michiko. “Movie Star Seeks Career Opportunity.” New York Times (February 9, 1981), C15. Kenworthy, E. W. “Paul Newman Drawing Crowds in McCarthy Indiana Campaign.” New York Times (April 22, 1968), 19. Latham, Aaron. “Paul Newman Takes the Stand.” Rolling Stone (January 20, 1983), http://www.rollingstone.com/. Lawson, Carol. “Paul Newman’s Camp for Children with Leukemia.” New York Times (September 18, 1986), C1. Lawson, Carol. “Paul Newman the Philanthropist: A Real-Life Role.” New York Times (January 25, 1985), B6. Leary, Gregg. “Paul Newman Crossed the Finish Line.” Speedtv.com (September 27, 2008), http://www.speedtv.com/wiki/Paul-Newman-Crossedthe-Finish-Line/. “Legendary Actor Paul Newman Dies at 83.” http://www.zap2it.com/celebrities/ news/zap-paulnewmanobit,0,5015664.story Lewis, Richard Warren. “Playboy Interview: Paul Newman.” Playboy (July 1968), http://www.playboy.com/articles/paul-newman-1968-interview/ index.html. Lewis, Richard Warren. “Waiting for a Horse: Paul Newman Makes a Western.” New York Times (November 6, 1966), 280.

SELECTED BIBLIOGR APHY

125

Lithwick, Dahlia. “Paul Newman: He Used His Fame to Give Away His Fortune.” Slate (September 27, 2008), http://www.slate.com/id/2201116. Miller, Edwin. “What’s Behind Those Beautiful Blue Eyes?” Seventeen (November 1970), 124, 166. Moynihan, Martin. “Fast Eddie Returns, Older, Wiser with a Protégé on His Back.” Albany Times Union (October 12, 1986), G1. Murray, Rebecca. “Paul Newman Talks about the Animated Family Film, Cars.” About.com, http://movies.about.com/od/cars/a/carspn053006.htm. “Nation: The Pulchritude-Intellect Input.” Time (May 31, 1968), http://www. time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,844498,00.html. Newman, Paul. “Confirmation Blues.” The Nation (April 7, 1997), 4, 5. Newman, Paul. Interview with Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York, June 1959. Oreovicz, John. “Newman a Lot of Things, but for Many Years, Racing Came First.” ESPN.com (September 28, 2008), http://sports.espn.go.com/ espn/print?id=3612479&type=story. Parsons, Louella O. “We Love Working Together.” Los Angeles Herald Examiner (February 3, 1963), H1, H3. “Paul Newman Announces Retirement,” Contactmusic.com, http://www.contact music.com/news.nsf/story/paul-newman-announces-retirement_ 1032247. “Paul Newman Dead at 83.” WestportNow, http://www.westportnow.com/ index.php?/v2/comments/21498/. Pogrebin, Robin. “An Evening of American Classics.” New York Times (December 1, 2002), A1, A8. Posey, Sam. “The Perils of Paul.” Sports Illustrated (August 25, 1980), http://sports illustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1123713/index.htm. “Quotations.” New York Times (October 19, 1969), E12. “Rachel, Rachel.” Time (September 6, 1968), http://www.time.com/time/mag azine/article/0,9171,900352,00.html. Reed, Rex. “The Doug and Mary of the Jet Age.” New York Times (September 1, 1968), D9. Renshaw, Jerry. “The Sting.” TCM.com, www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/article. jsp?contentId=72477. Ressner, Jeffrey, and Kenneth P. Vogel. “Paul Newman, Actor and Activist, Dies.” Politico.com (September 27, 2008), http://www.politico.com/news/ stories/0908/14017.html. Rother, Larry. “Crossing the Bridges with the Newmans.” New York Times (November 18, 1990), H13.

126

SELECTED BIBLIOGR APHY

Schickel, Richard. “A Movie Too True to Be Good.” Life (October 4, 1968). Shepard, Richard F. “Newman Rebuts ‘Apache’ Bias Charge.” New York Times (April 8, 1980), C5. Sheraton, Mimi. “Newman’s Salad Dressing: Oil, Vinegar and Ballyhoo.” New York Times (September 15, 1982), C1, C14. Smith, Dave. “Nell Newman and Peter Meehan—Newman’s Own Organics.” Organictobe.org (August 25, 2007), http://organictobe.org/2007/08/25/ nell-newman-and-peter-meehan-newmans-own-organics/. Smith, Lynn. “Actor Paul Newman dies at 83.” The Envelope, http://theenve lope.latimes.com/news/la-me-newman28-2008sep28,0,4739114.story Staff Review of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Variety (January 1, 1958), http:// www.variety.com/review/VE1117789784.html?categoryid=31&cs=1. Staff Review of “Hud.” Variety (January 1, 1963), http://www.variety.com/ review/VE1117791819.html?categoryid=31&cs=1. Staff Review of “The Hustler.” Variety (January 1, 1961), http://www.variety. com/review/VE1117791850.html?categoryid=31&cs=1. Steinberg, Jay. “The Color of Money.” TCM.com, http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/ title.jsp?stid = 71236&category = Articles. Thomas, Bob. “Paul Newman: His Life Story.” Good Housekeeping (May 1979), 135. Thompson, Howard. “Human Element at Speedway.” New York Times (May 23, 1969), 35. Weber, Bruce. “Paul Newman Chronicles Life at Bustling Grover’s Corner.” New York Times (June 13, 2002), E1, E3. Wilson, Jane. “Paul Newman: What If My Eyes Turn Brown?” Saturday Evening Post (February 24, 1968), 26. Woodward, Joanne. Interview with Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York, June 1959. Worrell, Denise, John Skow, and Elaine Dutka. “Paul Newman: Verdict on a Superstar.” Time (December 6, 1982), http://www.time.com/time/maga zine/article/0,9171,923114,00.html.

INDEX

Dean, James, 17, 24, 26, 27

Films: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 60–65, 71, 83, 86; Cars, 108; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 34; The Color of Money, 91, 103; Cool Hand Luke, 40, 44, 45, 57; Harper, 40, 42, 43, 44, 64; Hud, 40–44, 64; The Hustler, 39, 40, 43, 44, 103; The Long Hot Summer, 29, 30; Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, 30, 104, 105, 107; Nobody’s Fool, 105, 106; Rachel, Rachel, 57–60, 93, 102; The Road to Perdition, 107; The Silver Chalice, 24, 25, 104; Somebody Up There Likes Me, 26, 27, 29; The Sting, 61, 64, 65; The Verdict, 72, 102; Winning, 49, 65. Film reviews: Attanasio, Paul, 103, 104; Canby, Vincent, 63; Crowther, Bosley, 34, 43, 44; Ebert, Roger, 39, 40, 44, 58, 63, 64, 102, 103, 106; Variety staff, 34

Enemies list, 91, 95. See also Nixon, Richard

Hill, George Roy, 61, 64 Hitchcock, Alfred, 43

Academy Awards, 34, 39, 42, 45, 58, 60, 65, 91, 102, 103, 104, 107, 111 Actors Studio, 17, 20, 51 Addiction, 65– 66 Auto racing, 49–56: Haas, Carl, 55; Indianapolis 500, 49, 55; Le Mans, 54; Lime Rock, 50, 53, 109, 110; Newman-Haas, 55; Sharp, Bob, 50, 51, 52 Battler, The, 26 Brando, Marlon, 17, 27, 40, 43, 60, 92, 106 Buddy movies, 60 – 65, 71, 83, 86 Charity, 81– 90. See also Hole in the Wall Camps; PEN American Center Clift, Montgomery, 27

128

INDEX

Hole in the Wall Camps, 62, 83– 89, 111 Hotchner, A. E., 26, 61, 66, 69–77, 79, 81, 82, 87, 101, 110 Inge, William, 17, 18 Kenyon College, 9 –16, 65, 69 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 92 Leonard, Stew, 74, 75 Marriage: gay marriage, 96; Newman marriage to Jacqueline Witte, 11–12; Newman marriage to Joanne Woodward, 30, 110 McCarthy, Eugene, 92– 95 Nation, The, 96 Newman, Arthur S., Jr., 1, 4, 13, 58 Newman, Arthur S., Sr., 1, 2, 3, 10, 13 Newman, Claire (Clea), 42 Newman, Elinor (Nell), 38, 58, 78, 79 Newman, Joseph, 1, 2, 3, 5 Newman, Melissa (Lissy), 40, 109 Newman, Paul Leonard: Academy Award nominations and wins, 34, 39, 41, 42, 45, 60, 102, 103, 104, 107, 111; childhood, 1–6; death, 111; directorial experience, 57, 59, 60; divorce, 29–30; final illness, 110; marriages, 11, 12, 30; Navy experience, 6–8; screenwriter, 60; will, 111 Newman, Scott, 13, 15, 32, 65– 67, 101, 103 Newman, Stephanie, 29, 67

Newman, Susan, 18, 66, 67 Newman, Theresa Fetzer, 1– 4, 38 Newman’s Own, 4, 10, 13, 26, 55, 69 – 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 108, 109, 111 Newman-Stern Company, 2, 6, 10, 12, 13, 69, 71, 78 Nixon, Richard, 91, 95 PEN American Center, 83 Plays: The Desperate Hours, 24, 25; Our Town, 25, 108; Picnic, 17–19, 20; Sweet Bird of Youth, 38 Pranks, 61, 62 Redford, Robert, 41, 60, 61, 64 Stern, Stewart, 58 Stewart, Martha, 74 Warner Bros., 23, 27–29, 37, 38, 58 Westport: home, 40, 50, 69, 70, 73, 74, 78; Westport Country Playhouse, 108, 110, 111 Witte, Jacqueline (Jackie), 11–13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 29, 30, 67; divorce, 29–30; marriage to Paul Newman, 12 Woodward, Joanne, 18, 26, 29, 30 –33, 38, 40, 42, 57, 58, 60, 67, 76, 88, 96, 102–5, 107, 108, 110, 111; children, 38, 40, 42; as Westport Country Playhouse artistic director, 108 World War II, 6 – 8 Yale University, 13–17, 59

About the Author MARIAN EDELMAN BORDEN is a freelance book writer based in New York. She has written 11 nonfiction books on a wide range of topics including parenting, college prep, and veterans’ benefits. She is also the coauthor of two Sullivan Investigation mysteries, under the pen name Evelyn David. She is a member of the Authors Guild, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Mystery Writers of America.