Most of the tributes to Paul Newman that were published over the weekend stressed his role as a philanthropist in the years since he founded Newman’s Own in 1982.
If you had told the actor back in his Hollywood glory days that he would come to be nearly as well known for his salad dressing and popcorn as he was for his performances in dozens of movies, he probably would have thought you were mad. And with good reason. Who could have forecast that an almost jokey stunt — bottling Newman’s own salad dressing as a gift to pals — would turn into a major food company and charitable organization?
The star used the power of his celebrity to do good in a way that very few peers of his have ever managed. Locally, we enjoyed the benefit of his generosity at more fundraisers and in the coffers of more local non-profit organizations that anyone could ever count. The first time I ever saw Newman in the flesh was at a small Westport benefit in the early 1980s designed to raise money for the Russian Jewry who were emigrating to this country to flee the Soviet repression in the years just before glasnost.
Elsewhere on this website, I wrote a tribute to the way Newman became a truly good neighbor in Westport, especially when he and his wife Joanne Woodward pitched in to save the Westport Country Playhouse a decade ago when the theater’s future was dim indeed.
Over the weekend, I thought more about Newman as an actor than a public figure, however.
He was a star when I began going to movies as a child and he remained a major force in film through the 2002 hit “Road to Perdition.”
An actor who I saw play Melvyn Douglas’s angry son in “Hud” when I was just a kid in 1963 wound up his career 39 years later as the father of an angry son played by Daniel Craig.
When we watch the stars of our youth age and then die there is a special resonance. For baby boomers, Newman leaving the scene is a shock of the sort we only get when a loved one dies. Obviously, few of us “knew” him, but we saw him grow as an actor, branch out into directing (with the marvelous “Rachel, Rachel” which debuted 40 years ago this month) and then become a grand old man of the cinema (his performance in the 1994 “Nobody’s Fool” was a stunning culmination in the tradition of Burt Lancaster’s similar age-embracing work in “Atlantic City”).
Newman received 10 Oscar nominations for his best serious work, but I also loved his lighter performances during his 1960s peak years, fluff like “Harper” (1966) and “A New Kind of Love” (1963).
Saturday night, instead of sitting down with one of his classics like “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) I watched a picture that no one would place on the list of Newman’s best pictures — “The Prize” (1963) — a dopey, overblown MGM thriller about an attempted kidnapping of a Russian scientist during Nobel Prize week in Stockholm.
It was, no doubt, one of those big commercial items that made it possible for the star to appear in bleak downers like “Hud” (released the same year). Newman and his pal Robert Redford built their careers on a solid one-for-them-one-for-me foundation that demonstrated the possibility of juggling commerce and art in Hollywood.
Anyhow, I hadn’t seen “The Prize” in many years and, honestly, it doesn’t hold up very well, but to see Newman at the peak of his physical attractiveness dashing off a very appealing movie star performance was a wonderful reminder of why audiences adored both the actor and the man. Newman knew when (and how) to have fun with a part that made very few demands on his talent.
