Paul Newman

• 1. Introduction

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  At the 1995 24 Hours of Daytona, Paul Newman was 70 years and eight days old, and his team won its class. That made him the oldest driver to date on a winning team in a major sanctioned race. Newman was best known as a film star, and he has been called “one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars.” He was also a director, a food entrepreneur, a donor, a political activist and a racing team owner. How did a boy from the Cleveland suburbs end up doing all of that? Which of his famous roles came to him only because someone else could not play them? And what did it cost him to keep the name he was born with?

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• 2. Otherness in Shaker Heights

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  Paul Leonard Newman was born on the 26th of January 1925 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and raised in nearby Shaker Heights. He was the second son of Theresa Garth and Arthur Sigmund Newman Sr., who ran a sporting goods store. Theresa worked in that store while raising Paul and his elder brother Arthur.

  Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, his paternal grandparents, were Jewish emigrants from Hungary and Poland, respectively. His mother practiced Christian Science, though she had been born into a Roman Catholic family in the village of Peticse. Peticse then lay in the Kingdom of Hungary, inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today it is in Slovakia.

  Newman was seven when he played the court jester in a school production of Robin Hood. At ten he appeared in Saint George and the Dragon at the Cleveland Play House, and he also acted in its Curtain Pullers children's theater program. He graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1943 and then spent a short time at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

  In his posthumously published memoir, Newman described a “strong sense of otherness” because he was half-Jewish. He said his heritage “got in the way of my sitting at the 'A' table, which was important to me.” He knew only that “if you were Jewish, some avenues were shut to you,” and he said that hurt him and his brother a great deal.

  A high school fraternity excluded him for being Jewish. Later, a sailor's anti-Semitic slur led to a “bloody fight” in the Navy. Newman deflected the pain with humor, sometimes doing Yiddish voices “for laughs.” A family friend said the stigma was strong in Shaker Heights at the time. In her words, “Paul didn't seem Jewish at all, but he paid a price, he had a rough time.”

  As an adult, Newman followed the pluralistic Unitarian Universalism movement, yet he called himself a Jew, “because it's more of a challenge.” When he applied to Kenyon College after the Navy, he listed his religion as “Christian Scientist.” Apart from that one entry, he did not deny his Jewish background.

  After he began appearing in films, Newman made a point of keeping his name. Producer Sam Spiegel was considering him for the role of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront and asked him to “get rid of 'Paul Newman'.” Newman answered, “What do you want me to change it to, 'S.P. Ewman'?”

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• 3. Close Call at Okinawa

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  Yale University is where Newman's hope of flying for the Navy ended. He had enrolled in the Navy V-12 pilot training program there, and he was dropped when colorblindness was diagnosed. He later said the real story was “a bit more complicated,” and that he also “couldn't do the mathematical things that being a pilot requires.” A later test found that he was not colorblind at all.

  Boot camp followed, with training as a radioman and tail gunner. Newman performed poorly in that role. A friend from the service recounted in Newman's posthumous memoir that his friends lied to the Navy trainers so that he could pass.

  In 1944 Newman qualified in torpedo bombers and, as Aviation Radioman Third Class, was sent to Barbers Point, Hawaii. He was assigned to the Pacific-based replacement torpedo squadrons VT-98, VT-99 and VT-100. Their job was mainly to train replacement combat pilots and aircrewmen, with special emphasis on carrier landings. Newman later flew as a turret gunner in an Avenger torpedo bomber.

  In the spring of 1945, shortly before the Battle of Okinawa, his unit was assigned to an aircraft carrier along with other replacements. The pilot of Newman's aircraft had an earache and was grounded, and so was his whole crew, Newman included. The rest of their squadron flew to the carrier Bunker Hill. Days later, a kamikaze attack on that ship killed several hundred crewmen and airmen, including other members of his unit.

  Screenwriter Stewart Stern recalled in a 2011 interview that Newman drew on another Navy memory when he acted in a 1956 film. Newman thought of his best friend being sliced to pieces on an aircraft carrier by a plane's propeller, and he used that image as an emotional trigger for his character's trauma. The film was Arnold Laven's The Rack, in which Newman played the lead.

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• 4. Dean's Shadow

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  Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, awarded Newman a Bachelor of Arts in drama and economics in 1949. Soon afterward he joined summer stock companies, including the Belfry Players in Wisconsin and the Woodstock Players in Illinois. He toured with them for three months and developed his talents. He then spent a year at the Yale School of Drama before moving to New York City to study under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.

  Oscar Levant wrote that Newman was at first hesitant to leave New York for Hollywood. Newman's explanation was blunt: “Too close to the cake. Also, no place to study.” He had arrived in the city in 1951 with his first wife, Jackie Witte, and they settled in the St. George section of Staten Island.

  Television came first. His earliest credited role was in a 1952 episode of Tales of Tomorrow titled “Ice from Space.” On Broadway, he made his debut in the original production of William Inge's Picnic in 1953, with Kim Stanley. He followed it with The Desperate Hours in 1955 and, in 1959, Sweet Bird of Youth with Geraldine Page. Three years later he starred with Page again in the film version.

  His first Hollywood film was The Silver Chalice, released in 1954 and co-starring the Italian actress Pier Angeli. It was a box-office failure, and Newman later admitted he disliked it.

  In February 1954, Newman made a screen test with James Dean for East of Eden, directed by Gjon Mili. Newman tested for the role of Aron Trask and Dean for Aron's twin brother Cal. Dean got his part, and Newman lost out to Richard Davalos.

  That same year, Newman stepped in at the last minute for Dean in a live color television broadcast of Our Town, a musical version of Thornton Wilder's play. He co-starred with Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra. After Dean's death, Newman also took over Dean's part as a boxer in a television adaptation of Hemingway's story “The Battler,” written by A. E. Hotchner. It aired live on the 18th of October 1955.

  That performance led to his breakthrough as boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me in 1956. Dean had originally been cast as Graziano. Newman was also cast as Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun, another role first earmarked for Dean. Robert Wise directed Somebody Up There Likes Me, and Newman worked with Wise again in Until They Sail in 1957. That year he also acted in Michael Curtiz's The Helen Morgan Story.

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• 5. Fast Eddie and Butch

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  Elizabeth Taylor was Newman's co-star in the 1958 hit Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which brought his first Academy Award nomination. That same year, The Long, Hot Summer won him Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival.

  In 1961, Robert Rossen's The Hustler gave Newman the role of “Fast Eddie” Felson, a small-time pool hustler. The film is based on a book by Walter Tevis. Eddie challenges a legendary player portrayed by Jackie Gleason. The film was both a critical and a financial hit. Newman won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award and the Best Actor prize at the Argentinian Film Festival, and he earned an Oscar nomination. Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic called the principal cast, Newman included, “first-rate.”

  Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke in 1967 brought Newman another Best Actor nomination. In 2005 the United States Library of Congress chose it for the National Film Registry, calling it “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Critic Roger Ebert wrote that “Luke is the first Newman character to understand himself well enough to tell us to shove off.”

  Steve McQueen phoned Newman after reading the finished script of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by William Goldman. McQueen suggested that the two of them star together. Newman assumed he would play Sundance and proposed that they buy the rights jointly, and McQueen hesitated. Producer Paul Monash bought the property instead, and Newman was cast as Butch, with Robert Redford as Sundance.

  Director George Roy Hill was unhappy with stunt footage of the scene where Butch performs bicycle tricks, so Newman did the tricks himself. Newman also said the musical interlude was his idea, developed with Goldman. The film grossed over 15 million dollars, ranked fourth among that year's releases, and was nominated for Best Picture. Also in 1969, Newman joined Barbra Streisand and Sidney Poitier to form First Artists Production Company, so that actors could secure properties and develop their own projects.

  He reunited with Hill and Redford for The Sting in 1973. It earned more than 68 million dollars in North America and was the top-grossing film of 1974. Newman received top billing, 500,000 dollars and a percentage of the profits. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

  In 1974, Newman co-starred with Steve McQueen in the disaster film The Towering Inferno, playing an architect trapped in a burning skyscraper he had designed. He was paid 1,000,000 dollars plus a percentage of the gross, and he insisted on doing his own stunts. The film grossed 55 million dollars in North America.

  Slap Shot, a hockey comedy directed by Hill in 1977, drew mixed reviews, and many said it set a new standard for obscenities. On home video and cable it later gained cult status. Newman's own favorite was a film that flopped. He produced WUSA in 1970, after buying the rights to the novel with his partner John Foreman for 50,000 dollars. He later called it “the most significant film I've ever made and the best.”

  In 1986, twenty-five years after The Hustler, Newman played Fast Eddie again in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money. The cast included Tom Cruise, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and John Turturro. The film was a commercial success despite mixed reviews, and it finally won Newman the Academy Award for Best Actor. The same year he received an honorary Academy Award for his “many and memorable and compelling screen performances.” Over his career he was nominated for an Academy Award in five different decades.

  The nominations kept coming. In 1994 he starred in Robert Benton's Nobody's Fool, earning another Best Actor nomination and the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In Road to Perdition he played a conflicted mob boss opposite Tom Hanks, Jude Law and Stanley Tucci, and he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Sam Mendes directed that film.

  Newman's last Broadway role was in a 2003 revival of Wilder's Our Town, which earned him a Tony Award nomination. PBS and Showtime aired a taping of it, and he was nominated for an Emmy. His last live-action appearance was in the 2005 HBO mini-series Empire Falls, in which he played the dissolute father of the protagonist. It won him a Golden Globe and a Primetime Emmy.

  In Cars in 2006, he voiced Doc Hudson, a retired race car. It was his final role in a major feature film and his only animated one. In May 2007 he retired, saying: “You start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention. So I think that's pretty much a closed book for me.” He still came out of retirement to narrate the 2007 documentary Dale, about NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, and The Meerkats in 2008, his last film role of all. Almost nine years after his death, archival recordings made him part of Cars 3 in 2017.

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• 6. Partners On and Off Screen

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  Picnic on Broadway in 1953 was where Newman first met Joanne Woodward, then an understudy. Shortly after filming The Long, Hot Summer in 1957, he divorced Jackie Witte to marry Woodward in 1958. His marriage to Witte had lasted from 1949 and produced a son, Scott, and two daughters, Susan and Stephanie. Scott died of a drug overdose in November 1978.

  With Woodward, Newman had three more daughters: Elinor, known as Nell, Melissa, known as Lissy, and Claire, known as Clea. The family first lived on East 11th Street in Manhattan and then bought a home in Westport, Connecticut. They were among the first Hollywood movie star couples to raise their families outside California. The marriage lasted 50 years, until his death.

  The couple made 16 films together. Newman had no intention of directing Rachel, Rachel in 1968, a film built around Woodward and based on Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God. According to Woodward, he did not like the book. He changed his mind only when she could not find any other director, and they accepted deferred payment to make it. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won two Golden Globes, including Best Director. Newman directed daughter Nell alongside her mother in it.

  Sometimes a Great Notion, which Newman directed and starred in during 1971, had a rough start. Five weeks into shooting, the original director Richard A. Colla left over artistic differences and a throat operation. Around the same time, Newman broke his ankle, and production shut down on the 29th of July. George Roy Hill turned down the chance to take over, and when filming resumed two weeks later, Newman was directing.

  In 1972, Newman directed The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. It competed at Cannes, where Woodward won the best actress award, and Nell appeared in it as well. Later he directed Woodward in a screen version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie in 1987, with John Malkovich and Karen Allen. Variety called the result “a reverent record” of the play.

  Newman's own account of the marriage was plain. “I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?” he once said when asked about fidelity. He credited the marriage's success to “some combination of lust and respect and patience. And determination.” Woodward said that once looks fade, “what is finally left is, if you can make somebody laugh,” and added that “he sure does keep me laughing.”

  In 1992 the couple received the Kennedy Center Honors, and in 1994 they received a Jefferson Awards prize for public service. They also became mentors to Allison Janney, whom they met when she was a Kenyon College freshman in a play Newman was directing.

  Newman once started a memoir, with tapes compiled by his friend Stewart Stern, and then abandoned it. In 2022 it was finally published as The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man. The same year, Ethan Hawke built the HBO Max docuseries The Last Movie Stars from those tapes. Laura Linney voiced Woodward, and George Clooney voiced Newman.

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• 7. Racing Life

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  Watkins Glen Racing School is where Newman found a talent that surprised him. He went there to train for the 1969 film Winning, and later called racing “the first thing that I ever found I had any grace in.” His instructor was Bob Bondurant.

  In 1971, Newman agreed to star in and host Once Upon a Wheel, a television special on the history of auto racing. Producer David Winters said Newman had publicly sworn off television and relented only after hearing Winters explain his vision. Bondurant said it was a passion project because Newman wanted to learn how to drive, and that he had refused better-paid work to do it. Newman himself said, “I love to test a car on my own, to see what I can do, but racing with 25 other guys is a whole different thing.”

  His first professional race was in 1972 at Thompson International Speedway. He entered quietly as “P. L. Newman,” a name he kept using in the racing community. Over the rest of that decade, he competed often in Sports Car Club of America events and won four national championships. In 1979, he drove Dick Barbour's Porsche 935 in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and finished second.

  From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s he drove mainly Datsuns, later rebranded as Nissans, for the Bob Sharp Racing team in the Trans-Am Series. He became so closely tied to the brand that he appeared in Nissan commercials in Japan and had a special-edition Nissan Skyline named for him.

  In 1976 he contacted Bill Freeman about forming a professional team. Newman Freeman Racing, based in Santa Barbara, California, ran Budweiser-sponsored, Chevrolet-powered Spyder NFs in the Can-Am series. It won the Can-Am Team Championship in 1979. In 1983 Newman co-founded the Champ Car team Newman/Haas Racing with Carl Haas, which won eight drivers' championships under his ownership.

  He also briefly co-owned a research and development team in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series, the #18 car driven by Greg Sacks with Hendrick Motorsports. It shut down after two seasons when it lost its primary sponsor. He narrated the 1997 IMAX film Super Speedway, which followed the 1996 racing season.

  Newman had said he would stop racing “when I embarrass myself.” He kept going into his 80s, and he won at Lime Rock in what former co-driver Sam Posey called a “brutish Corvette” carrying the number 81, his age. He took the pole in his last professional race, at Watkins Glen in 2007. In a 2008 run at Lime Rock arranged by friends, he reportedly still managed nine-tenths of his best time.

  The Sports Car Club of America inducted him into its Hall of Fame on the 21st of February 2009, at its national convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. His racing life was the subject of the 2015 documentary Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman.

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• 8. Giving, Politics and Farewell

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  Salad dressing began it. In 1982, Newman and the writer A. E. Hotchner founded Newman's Own with that single product. The line later grew to include pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, salsa and wine. Newman set a policy that all proceeds after taxes go to charity, and the pair wrote a memoir titled Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good. As of May 2021, the donations totaled more than 570 million dollars.

  In 1988 Newman co-founded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut, a residential summer camp for seriously ill children. It is named for the gang in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and for the real Hole-in-the-Wall outlaw hideout in northern Wyoming. That year he also founded the SeriousFun Children's Network, and the original camp grew into several camps in the United States, Ireland, France and Israel. In 1995 his college fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, adopted the Connecticut camp as its national philanthropy.

  In 2006, he co-founded Safe Water Network with John Whitehead, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, and Josh Weston, a former chairman of ADP. Its aim was safe water for underserved communities around the world. On the 1st of June 2007, Kenyon College announced that Newman had given 10 million dollars to establish a scholarship fund. Givingback.org named him the Most Generous Celebrity of 2008, noting that he gave 20,857,000 dollars that year to the Newman's Own Foundation.

  Politics took as much of his energy. In 1968, Newman backed Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and went to the Democratic National Convention as a McCarthy-pledged delegate from Connecticut. His support for McCarthy, his television commercials in California and his opposition to the Vietnam War earned him the nineteenth spot on Richard Nixon's enemies list. Newman called that his greatest accomplishment.

  He attended the March on Washington on the 28th of August 1963, and the first Earth Day event in Manhattan on the 22nd of April 1970. In 1976, he and Woodward went to Washington to speak in favor of breaking up Big Oil, backed by a group of wealthy Los Angeles-area men nicknamed the “Malibu Mafia.” In January 1995, he led a group of investors, including the writer E. L. Doctorow and the editor Victor Navasky, that bought the progressive periodical The Nation. He sometimes wrote for it.

  In May 2008, Newman stepped down from directing the Westport Country Playhouse production of Of Mice and Men, citing his health. In June it was widely reported that he had lung cancer and was being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Hotchner said Newman had told him about the illness some 18 months earlier. Newman had smoked heavily for most of his life and quit in 1986. He died at his home in Westport on the morning of the 26th of September 2008, at the age of 83, and was cremated after a private funeral.

  L'Osservatore Romano, the Italian newspaper regarded as semi-official for the Holy See, praised him as “a generous heart, an actor of a dignity and style rare in Hollywood quarters.” In 1994 he had received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charity work. Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals named him Man of the Year in 1968, and in 2015 the United States Postal Service issued a forever stamp bearing his portrait and the words “Actor/Philanthropist.”

  Not every tribute pleased him. Since the 1970s, students at several colleges have celebrated an unofficial Newman Day by trying to drink 24 beers in 24 hours. In 2004 he asked Princeton University to dissociate the event from his name, pointing to the Scott Newman Center, which he created in 1980 to prevent substance abuse through education. Princeton replied that it did not sponsor or encourage the event.

  On the 26th of October 2017, his Rolex Daytona wristwatch sold at a Phillips auction in New York for 17.5 million dollars, one of the highest prices ever paid for a wristwatch at auction. In 2022 Lime Rock Park renamed the straight past the Esses, just before The Uphill, the Paul Newman Straight.

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