Paul Newman

Paul Newman: Movie Star, Racer, Philanthropic Engineer

In 1979 a fifty-four-year-old Academy Award nominee finished second overall at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, sharing a Porsche 935 with Rolf Stommelen and Dick Barbour. He had entered his first race seven years earlier under the name "P.L. Newman," on the theory that the entry list would go easier on him than the gossip columns. It is a useful way into Paul Newman: the famous face was the least interesting instrument he owned, and he spent five decades finding things to do that it could not do for him.

Shaker Heights and the Bunker Hill

Newman was the second son of Arthur Sigmund Newman, who ran a sporting goods store in Cleveland, and Theresa Garth Fetzer, a Christian Science practitioner from a Slovak Catholic family. His father was Jewish, of Hungarian and Polish descent, and Newman grew up half-Jewish in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where the arrangement attracted the discrimination it usually attracted. He later said he considered himself Jewish "because it's more of a challenge," and he declined the studio-era suggestion that he change his name.

He graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1943 and went to war. Enrolled in the Navy's V-12 programme at Yale to train as a pilot, he washed out — colour-blindness in some tellings, mathematics in others — and retrained as a radioman and tail gunner, qualifying as an Aviation Radioman Third Class in torpedo bombers in 1944. Assigned to the carrier USS *Bunker Hill* in the Pacific, he and his crew were grounded before the kamikaze attack that killed several hundred men aboard. He spent the rest of his life declining to make anything heroic of it.

Yale, Kenyon, and the Studio

After the war Newman took a degree in drama and economics at Kenyon College in 1949, spent a year at the Yale School of Drama, and then went to New York and the Actors Studio, where Lee Strasberg was training the generation that would replace the studio contract player. He made his Broadway debut in 1953 in William Inge's *Picnic*, where an understudy named Joanne Woodward was also working. They married in 1958 and stayed married until his death fifty years later. He kept returning to the stage, ending with *Our Town* in 2003 and a Tony nomination at seventy-eight.

The Cool Hand

*Somebody Up There Likes Me* (1956), in which he played the boxer Rocky Graziano, got him noticed. *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof* (1958), opposite Elizabeth Taylor, brought his first Academy Award nomination; *The Long, Hot Summer* the same year won him Best Actor at Cannes. Then *The Hustler* (1961) — Fast Eddie Felson, a BAFTA, another Oscar nomination, and the critic Stanley Kauffmann's verdict that Newman was "first-rate."

What followed is one of the more remarkable runs in American film: *Hud* (1963), *Cool Hand Luke* (1967), and three pictures with George Roy Hill — *Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid* (1969), the year's highest-grossing film; *The Sting* (1973), which took sixty-eight million dollars and Best Picture; and the hockey comedy *Slap Shot* (1977). He worked with Sidney Lumet on *The Verdict* (1982), where Roger Ebert found him giving audiences "old, bone-tired, hung-over, trembling (and heroic) Frank Galvin," and with Martin Scorsese on *The Color of Money* (1986), returning to Fast Eddie a quarter-century on — the film that finally won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. The Academy had already handed him an honorary award the same year, a gesture that told him precisely what it thought his chances were. Nine nominations in total, seven Golden Globes, a BAFTA, an Emmy, a Screen Actors Guild award. He was still working at eighty-one, voicing Doc Hudson in *Cars*.

Behind the Camera

Newman directed eight films, most of them vehicles for his wife. *Rachel, Rachel* (1968) was nominated for Best Picture and won Woodward the Best Actress prize at Cannes; *The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds* (1972) won her the same award again. He also directed *Sometimes a Great Notion* (1971), *Harry & Son* (1984) and *The Glass Menagerie* (1987).

P.L. Newman

The racing was not a hobby in the celebrity sense. Newman learned to drive properly while training for the 1969 film *Winning* and began competing in 1972 at Thompson International Speedway. He won four Sports Car Club of America national championships and finished second at Le Mans in 1979. At the 1995 Rolex 24 at Daytona, aged seventy years and eight days, he became the oldest driver on a winning team in a major sanctioned race, and he was still taking pole position in 2007, at Watkins Glen, in his final professional race. As an owner he was more successful still: Newman/Haas Racing, founded with Carl Haas in 1983, took eight drivers' championships in Champ Car.

The Salad Dressing

In 1982, Newman and the writer A. E. Hotchner began bottling a salad dressing he had been mixing for friends. The joke became Newman's Own, structured on one unusual rule — every penny of after-tax profit goes to charity. By May 2021 the cumulative total exceeded $570 million.

He spent it deliberately. In 1988 he opened the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut, named for the outlaw hideout in *Butch Cassidy*, so that children with serious illnesses could, in the camp's own phrase, just be kids and "raise a little hell." It is free to families, funded by donation, and it grew: sibling sessions from 1989, retreats for parents and caregivers from 1992, a hospital outreach programme launched in 2002 that now runs specialists into nearly forty locations, and sister camps abroad through SeriousFun Children's Network. He co-founded the Safe Water Network in 2006 and gave $10 million to Kenyon College in 2007. A lifelong Democrat, he placed nineteenth on Nixon's enemies list, and called it his greatest accomplishment.

Why Paul Is Called a Genius

Newman is a hard case for the word, and he would have been the first to say so — self-deprecation was close to a nervous tic with him. The acting claim does not rest on the incandescence associated with Brando or Dean. It rests on something less dramatic and arguably harder: subtraction. Newman's characteristic move is to withhold. Fast Eddie, Hud, Luke, Frank Galvin — these are men whose interiors the audience is made to infer rather than shown, and the technical achievement is knowing exactly how much to leave out while keeping the frame alive. That is craft, an intelligence of judgement and self-editing rather than raw temperament, and it is why he improved into his sixties and seventies while more explosive talents burned out.

The counter-case is real. It took the Academy eight tries and a sequel to give him Best Actor, and the honorary award handed over in the same year suggests the industry long regarded him as a durable star rather than a great artist. Much of his early fame was a matter of a face. If the word genius attaches to Newman most defensibly, it may attach not to the performances but to the structure he invented: a consumer food business whose entire profit is pre-committed to charity, an idea simple enough to describe in one sentence, difficult enough that few have copied it, and productive of more than half a billion dollars. That is an act of design, and it is the part of his work that keeps compounding.

Legacy

Newman died of lung cancer at his home in Westport, Connecticut, on 26 September 2008, aged eighty-three; a heavy smoker for most of his life, he had quit in 1986. *Cool Hand Luke* sits in the National Film Registry. The Vatican newspaper *L'Osservatore Romano* called him "a generous heart, an actor of a dignity and style rare in Hollywood quarters." In 2015 the United States Postal Service issued a stamp inscribed simply "Actor/Philanthropist" — the correct two words, in the correct order.

Achievements

• Motorsports Hall of Fame of America