Paul Newman (2 page)

N
EWMAN WAS
proud of his profession, eternally grateful to his teachers and peers and colleagues and to the writers and directors who created the roles and the projects he appeared in. But like other men’s men who take up acting, he could find himself embarrassed by the fussiness of his craft, and he had a need to assert himself in other, more physical areas of life in order to pass muster with himself. And so auto racing, as alien a pastime to the arts as could be imagined, became a second world for him. Picking it up in his mid-forties, he was seen at first as a dilettante. But his bulldog tenacity (and, too, his native athleticisim and his uncommon financial means) took him to remarkable
levels of accomplishment: four national amateur titles, two professional race victories, a second-place finish at the famed twenty-four-hour race in Le Mans, and, at age seventy, a victory in his team’s class in the 24 Hours of Daytona—making him the oldest person to win a sanctioned auto race ever, anywhere. As a team owner in even higher classes of competition, his success was greater still: 8 national titles and 107 individual race victories—a massive haul.

And he was nearly as accomplished an entrepreneur as he was a race-car driver and owner. As a purveyor of food products, a business that he didn’t enter until his mid-fifties, he created new standards for the elimination of preservatives and the use of fresh ingredients in salad dressings, spaghetti sauces, salsas, and snack foods. And when he expanded into organic foods, his became one of the nation’s most recognized and trusted brands. Those businesses led to another area of achievement: philanthropy. Aside from the millions of dollars and thousands of hours he donated privately over the years, his Newman’s Own Foundation, which gave away all post-tax profits from the food businesses, doled out more than $250 million in its first twenty-five years of existence. And in the final years before his death, Newman bequeathed his share of the company—valued at nearly $120 million—for similar distribution.

I
T’S A
staggering list of achievements—the acting, the racing, the earnings, the giving away—and he could sometimes seem uneasy about it all and, especially, about the image that the rest of the world had of him as a result. The great sportswriter Jim Murray, who met him on a racetrack, opined, “He’s probably the only guy in America who doesn’t want to be Paul Newman.” And William Goldman, who wrote
Harper
and
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, remarked similarly, “I don’t think Paul Newman really thinks he is Paul Newman in his head.”

In rare unguarded moments, he admitted as much. “The toughest role is playing Paul Newman,” he told a reporter. “My own personality is so vapid and bland, I have to go steal the personalities of other people to be effective.”

He wasn’t blowing smoke. He was a man of great gifts, but he was
genuinely humble, believing in work and family and luck and community and the greater good—and if a surfeit of that good slopped up onto his plate over the years, he would be sure to share it, and he would do so in the best humor he could. Somehow he had turned the gifts life and luck had granted him into things he could multiply and give back. Occasionally along the way he would misstep or be discourteous or make a wrong aesthetic choice or drive ill-advisedly or whatnot, but what he never did was hole up, retreat, give in, surrender, or fail to engage.

“What I would really like to put on my tombstone,” he once said, “is that I was part of my time.”

And he was.

S
HAKER
H
EIGHTS WAS A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM, PART
G
AR
den of Eden, part Camelot, part World of Tomorrow.

It had lawns and trees and winding roads and handsome homes and golf courses and some of the nation’s best schools and rapid transit into the heart of a major city. Its parks were slices of raw wilderness left unspoiled and right at hand to enjoy. Its commercial heart, Shaker Square, was a modern, well-appointed shopping district built to recall a New England village green. The town was among the crests of that great energetic wave of American expansion known as the Roaring Twenties. A man who brought his family to live there could count himself a true success. And children born there could count themselves truly lucky.

Or so it would seem.

“Shaker Heights was a cloister,” said Paul Newman, who grew up there from the age of two.

It happens that he was a restless sort. But it also happens to be an apt description: the town had, in fact, been built on hallowed ground.

Shaker Heights stood about ten miles from Public Square, the traditional heart of Cleveland, Ohio. Originally known as North Union, the area had first been settled in the 1820s by a colony of Shakers, one of those Protestant sects that thrived in young America and that took its name from the physically vigorous style of prayer practiced by its adherents. They called their new home “the Valley of God’s Pleasure,” but it didn’t please God for them to thrive there for long: Shakers are,
by doctrine, celibate, increasing their numbers only through adoption and conversion; by 1889 a lack of newcomers meant that the once-thriving community of hundreds had dwindled to twenty-nine aging folks who could no longer maintain their homes or work their land. They sold their bit of heaven—1,366 acres, including mills and other buildings—to a consortium of Cleveland investors for $316,000. The land was platted and renamed Shaker Heights, but it lay undeveloped for more than a decade. In 1905 Mantis and Oris Van Sweringen, a truly eccentric pair of Cleveland developers, acquired and built on a few of the unused lots, creating a small village. Within two years the brothers had arranged for a streetcar line to come out to their parcels, acquired the rest of the undeveloped land, and unveiled their scheme for the town.

What they had in mind was an exacting utopian plan, an idyll far enough from the center of Cleveland to be free of smoke and noise and tumult but sufficiently close that commuting would be but a comfortable morning’s and evening’s ride. They imagined a genteel garden of a suburb governed by strict housing codes and covenants, a paradise for prosperous families built along the English bourgeois ideal of the village.

Anyone from Cleveland could appreciate the desire for such a retreat. The city from which Shaker Heights residents would be migrating was one of the chief cauldrons of the American industrial epoch, young and brawny and composed of equal parts New England propriety, frontier rascality, and immigrant vitality. And it was constantly growing: a century earlier it had been a wilderness outpost with a population of literally one, and by the end of the First World War it was a crucial hub of oil refining, iron and steel manufacturing, retail commerce, and transit—the sixth largest city in the United States.

As a city, Cleveland was a stripling: grimy, raucous, and rude, its Lake Erie waterfront choked with shipping traffic, its Cuyahoga River slow and fetid, its railyards and factories belching smoke and bleeding noise, its inner core a patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods teeming with imported sights, sounds, and smells. There was always a portion of the city dedicated to civic enrichment, organization, culture, the finer things; it had gentility. But it was far more impressed with its
industry than with its soul. Anyone with a head to make a business for himself could create wonders in such a freewheeling environment; local boy John D. Rockefeller had already risen from dubious roots to become a metaphor for unimaginable wealth created out of thin air. But anyone with a head to make a life for himself would seek more easeful and commodious surroundings. And on the anticipation of fulfilling that urge the Van Sweringens’ plan was realized.

B
Y
1920, when the Shaker Heights Rapid Transit line was inaugurated to speed riders to and from Cleveland, Shaker Heights had more than 1,600 residents; ten years later, it had swelled to more than 17,000, all living in single-family homes, none of which, per the Van Sweringens’ plan, were exactly alike. Among the newcomers were Arthur S. Newman and his wife, Theresa, who invested in the dream of Shaker Heights in 1927, moving with their two sons, three-year-old Arthur and two-year-old Paul, into a big but not ostentatious $35,000 house at 2983 Brighton Road.

That was a lot of money for the time—nearly a half-million dollars in contemporary terms—but it was a remarkably flush moment for the national economy, and Art, as he was commonly known, wouldn’t have spent it if he couldn’t afford it. As secretary and treasurer of Newman-Stern, Cleveland’s largest and best-liked sporting goods and consumer electronics store, he was a man who had created out of whole cloth a business built on a nation’s increased devotion to entertainment and leisure time. The 1920s were a golden age of sports heroes—Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Jack Dempsey—and Newman-Stern could sell you not only all the gear and accoutrements that you’d require to emulate those greats but also a radio on which to listen to accounts of their achievements. As long as Clevelanders had money in their pockets and free time in which to spend it, the sporting goods and electronics business was sure to thrive.

So why not buy a nicer home? Previously the Newmans had lived in Cleveland Heights at 2100 Renrock Road, a small, trim, undistinguished single-family dwelling in a neighborhood close by a pair of busy streets—not the nicest part of Cleveland Heights but conveniently near
the home of Arthur’s older brother Joseph, who also happened to be his business partner and, probably, best friend in the world.

Brighton Road was an obvious step up. An English Tudor house with a peaked roof, it was a pleasant stroll away from Shaker Boulevard, the town’s main artery, and it was set back from the curling street on which it stood by two rectangles of lawn and a handful of oak and maple trees. A fireplace dominated the front room, and big windows looked out over the front and back yards. There were more imposing homes on the street—indeed, there were outright mansions nearby. But the Newmans’ home would certainly satisfy anyone’s idea of comfort, modest luxury, and good taste.

For Arthur and Theresa, the house was a physical realization of the dreams of all those immigrants who had left Europe for America and a chance to make something of themselves. Arthur’s parents were both born in the old country, as was Theresa herself. Their ability to rise from those roots to the prosperity of Shaker Heights was an instance of what many would call the American dream, and it was also a crucial element in what would become the character of their younger son.

C
LEVELAND WAS
a city of three genetic threads: the New England gentility of its founders, who hailed from Connecticut and tried to build a city according to their sense of propriety; the frontier wildness of its first inhabitants, who were drawn to a settlement on the edge of civilization, where the laws of nature and the frontier trumped those of governments; and the immigrant waves who filled and fueled the factories that came to define the city when industrialization supersized it from a town to a metropolis. In 1800 the hamlet had a single resident; eighty years later there were more than 260,000 Clevelanders, at least a third of whom were foreign-born.

Those immigrants are a crucial part of the city’s story. They came from all the predictable places: England and Ireland and Germany at first, then Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Russia, the Slavic states, Greece. They brought with them languages, customs, foods, social modes, and ways of worship never before seen in the region. Before 1836, for instance, there is no record of a Jewish resident in the place
named for a man called Moses Cleaveland. By 1850, though, there were enough Jews in the city for them to have a theological falling-out: a pair of rival synagogues existed in an uneasy truce. By 1880 more than three thousand Jews were living in the booming city, mostly German, with more on the way from farther east.

Among that small but highly visible group of Jewish immigrants were Simon Newman, who had been born in 1853 in Hungary, and Hannah Cohn, who was born four years later in what was variously described as Hungary and Poland in legal documents throughout her life. Simon had arrived in the United States as a young, footloose man and found work as a dry goods peddler. Hannah had emigrated as a seventeen-year-old in 1870, along with her parents and some older siblings who moved on to settle in Arkansas.

Hannah and Simon were married in Cleveland on October 10, 1876, and they started a family almost immediately. In the 1880 census the Newmans listed two girls in their household: Minnie, not quite two, and an infant, Lillian. At nearly regular intervals they added to the family: a son, Aaron, born in 1881, followed by another pair of girls, Ottile (1884) and Gertrude (1886). By then Simon had graduated from peddler to manufacturer-merchant, with his own hat-making workshop and store, Newman’s Millinery. Perhaps that accounts for the pause in births in the family. It wasn’t until 1891 that Joseph, the second son, was born, followed by the last of the bunch, Arthur, in 1893.

The Newmans lived in the Jewish neighborhoods of Cleveland that resembled the Jewish enclaves of other big American cities, with pushcarts and small family businesses and tenements pouring out old-world noises and aromas—cauldrons from which bright young men and women strove toward integration into American society through education and entry into social and cultural institutions. As in New York and Chicago, the Cleveland Jews established themselves relatively rapidly in professional, academic, and public pursuits throughout the city. They may even have made a quicker ascent there than in other places because of the youth of the city and its lightning rise and its sprawl.

Consider the Newmans. There were grander birthrights, even among recent immigrant families, than the Newmans’ tiny family hat-making business. But Hannah and Simon were raising a remarkably
creative and successful group of offspring. Their hat shop, for instance, would one day be immortalized in 1943 in
Polly Poppingay, Milliner
, a popular chapter book for children written by Gertrude Newman, who by then had already published another children’s book,
The Story of Delicia, a Rag Doll.
Lillian, too, was a writer, producing verse in Yiddish. Ottile would become a schoolteacher and go on to head the drama group at the Euclid Avenue Temple, probably the most prominent synagogue in Cleveland; one of her sons, Richard Newman Campen, would graduate from Dartmouth College and forge a career as a noted historian of midwestern art and architecture.

The Newman boys were also to make marks on the world. Aaron attended some college and then became a reporter for the
Cleveland World
and, in 1906, the cofounder and business manager of the
Jewish Independent
, one of several Jewish papers in town. In 1927, that incredibly flush year, he inaugurated two enterprises: the Little Theater of the Movies, the first cinema in Cleveland devoted exclusively to foreign films, and the Cleveland Sportsman’s and Outdoors Show, a trade fair at which manufacturers and retailers exhibited the latest recreational gear. During the Depression he wrote several satirical pamphlets about the fear of Communist strains in the New Deal.
*

Quite a character. And yet his brother Joseph made even more of a splash in the world. No history of twentieth-century Cleveland is truly complete without mentioning, at least in passing, the ingenious, loquacious, mercurial, professorial, practical, affable, quixotic sprite born Joseph Simon Newman. Poet, inventor, orator, journalist, gadabout, boulevardier, and mensch, Joe Newman published science columns and light verse in newspapers, held patents on electronic communications gizmos, wrote the annual musical comedy revue for the City Club for more than three decades, taught at Cleveland College, served as a
trustee of the Cleveland Play House, published four books of poetry, and built with his kid brother, Arthur, the most successful sporting and recreational goods store between Chicago and New York.

Joe was always good with both words and numbers. After high school he spent a year at college and then worked for six months in an electrical lab. Then he went into retail, working for the big Stearn and Co. department store in the electrical, camera, and mechanical toy departments. All the while he fussed with electrical equipment and with words. Under the name Dr. Si. N. Tiffic, he wrote a kids’ science column for the
Plain Dealer
, as well as a stream of light verse on public issues of the day. And he invented things—small radio and telegraph components, remote-controlled switches for toys and lights, a telephone system for children—some of which he took out patents for.