Paul Newman (3 page)

By 1913 he was married to the daughter of Maurice Weidenthal, who had cofounded the
Jewish Independent
with Aaron Newman. The following year he was on his own in business, using $500 to establish the Electro-Set Company, which built and sold lines of radio gear, telegraph equipment, electrical experiment kits, telescopes, and microscopes. The business took off, especially with kids, and moved from what was essentially a warehouse to a proper retail space. Joe had all kinds of schemes to grow the trade, such as a daily telegraph message to all customers to announce sales or new equipment: e-commerce in 1915! And because he knew his way around the insides of the equipment he sold, the shop became Cleveland’s first supplier of radio parts; soon it was involved in a thriving national mail-order enterprise.

Unfortunately, World War I put an end to the sale of wireless equipment to civilians, and Electro-Set was suddenly deprived of a large part of its business. In 1917 it morphed, changing its name to Newman-Stern and mixing in sporting goods with the remaining lines of scientific and electrical equipment. Joe would serve as president of the company, and he had two partners: Arnold L. Stern, who was strictly an investor, and as secretary and treasurer his own younger brother, Art, a bachelor and failed journalist then twenty-three years old.

A
RTHUR
S
IGMUND
N
EWMAN
was born on August 29, 1893, and soon afterward the family was altered forever; by the time of his second birthday, his father had died. Art, as he was always known, would be raised by his sisters and brothers, all still living at home as late as 1900. Hannah ran Newman’s Millinery in the bustling Jewish commercial district on Cleveland’s West Twenty-sixth Street. Like Joe, who was only two years older, Art attended Central High School; like Aaron, he was drawn into newspaper work. Not long after high school he founded, published, wrote, and solicited ads for a local business circular, the
Home Advertiser.
He parlayed that into a job in the advertising and news departments of the
Cleveland Press
, where he proved unlucky: in 1915, phoning into the newsroom to report a scoop regarding a contentious strike at the Mechanical Rubber Company, he was inadvertently connected to the rival
Cleveland News
, which published his story while his own paper got nothing; they canned him.

And so Art went straight to work at Electro-Set, finding in Joe not only a surrogate parent (Hannah had died in 1913 when Art was seven teen) but a perfectly complementary partner as well. A few years later, interviewed in a Cleveland business journal, Joe said: “Art and I are as alike as sunup and sundown. I am the maniac of the business—the long-haired dreamer. At least that’s Art’s diagnosis. He is the hard-shelled, brass-tacks man. Every business needs both types. One counteracts the other.” The brothers would work together side by side for decades: Joe a wise and wacky jester filled with unpredictable energies, Art balding and sad-eyed and diligent and upright and exact. (Even in his twenties he looked older than his older brother.)

The Newman-Stern Company they built would break all sorts of new ground: it was the first entity in Cleveland to broadcast election results by radio and the first to offer steel fishing rods and steel-shafted golf clubs; its sale of microscopes for children virtually invented the field. In 1921 the business relocated to a large downtown storefront, where it would expand again after just seven years and then again after World War II, by which time it had become the premier destination in the region for sporting equipment: baseball, camping and fishing gear, skis, small boats, tents, as well as radios, even television sets. And it always had a hand in gizmos: in 1946 Art stumbled upon a sweet deal on
army surplus bombsight parts and gyroscopes and did a rampaging business liquidating it.
*

In all that time the brothers remained extremely close. Joe Newman filed away his personal correspondence for decades, including letters written by Art while Joe was off on business trips or family vacations with his wife and two sons. Dutifully, Art would tell him which shipments had arrived, which sales items were moving or not, what the next round of advertising would promote, and other mundane matters. There was fluency and energy in Art’s prose but rarely anything very personal or revelatory. On the odd occasion when Art would encounter Joe’s family during the latter’s absence, he would note it, but never sentimentally. In comparison, Joe’s letters to his brother, some of which he kept carbon copies of, were filled with levity—he would often insist that Art actually enjoy a vacation and not worry about business while on holiday—and Joe’s letters back and forth with his wife and sons were extremely tender, playful, open, and rich. Art was the worker ant, Joe the butterfly: together they were a natural team.

Before he built this empire, though, Art Newman had to emerge as his own man. On December 7, 1917, he enlisted in the army reserve corps; he was called up to active duty three weeks later and lasted in the service until he was honorably discharged in February 1919. He never went overseas but rather spent his time with the Quartermaster Corps in Johnston, Florida, and later in Maryland and Virginia. He attained the rank of corporal and served mainly in motor pools, a dreary existence that he described in letters to Joe and in accounts of military life in the
Plain Dealer.
By 1920 he was back in Cleveland and living on East Ninetieth Street, the core of one of the city’s old Jewish communities. And sometime between then and 1925, he got married.

I
F THE
marriage of Arthur and Theresa Newman is clouded in a mist of half-facts, that may be because Theresa Newman herself came from
a more imprecisely chronicled background than did her husband. She was of either Hungarian or Bohemian stock and seems to have been born overseas sometime in the 1890s or maybe even earlier. She came to America at perhaps age four, perhaps in 1901. In one of the earliest official documents associated with her life—the birth certificate of her second son—she claimed to have been born in 1897 in Homona, Austria, citing the Hungarian name for the modern-day Slovakian town of Humenne. But that was only one version of her story.

How she arrived in America and with whom is a mystery. Her father bore the Christian name Stephen, but in legal documents over the years his surname was variously rendered as Fetzer (which Theresa and her sons used most commonly), Fetsko (favored by most of Theresa’s siblings), Fetzko, Felsko, and, once, Fecke. Stephen was born in 1854 or 1855; by one account, he arrived in America in 1890 at the port of Philadelphia; by another, he came through New York in 1889. (Both dates, crucially, predate Theresa’s year of birth, as she identified it.) On August 11, 1902, he married Mary Polinak (or Polenak), who was born in either Hungary or Bohemia and was about twenty years his junior. Together they raised seven children; in Stephen’s 1946 obituary, they were listed as “Theresa Newman, Mae Eskowsi, Jewell and Andrew, Steve Polenak, Anna Kurma and Michael (deceased).”

Over the years Stephen worked at various manual trades: laborer, shipbuilder, bricklayer. When her house was empty, Mary took work in a mill. Their contradictory, inconsistent, and seemingly hesitant attitude toward official record keeping may just be part of the family heritage as unschooled immigrants who came to America to fuel the industrial expansion of towns like Cleveland. They had neither the intellectual bent of the Newmans nor that family’s capacity for invention and self-fulfillment. If the Newmans were archetypical incarnations of the clever, successful Jewish immigrants who refashioned themselves in America, the Fetsko-Polenaks were among the imported labor force that did the thankless, muscular work of the great American industrial expansion. They stayed out of the papers for all the right reasons and formed large, hearty families throughout the Midwest that replaced Eastern Europe as their home.

Stephen and Mary’s blended family moved around every few years,
and they either were overlooked by census takers or got hinky when they came around: only in 1920 were they fully polled in the national head count. And Theresa was even more elusive. Indeed, for much of her early life, surmise is all that’s possible. In 1910 a seventeen-year-old Theresa Fetzer was working as a domestic at the home of Meyer E. Loeb of Cleveland. If it was she, it meant that she was a little older than she later claimed. (Perhaps she and/or the Loebs lied about her age in order to acquire or legitimize her working situation.) She didn’t appear in the 1920 census, but she showed up in 1930, by which point the received impression of her life story has begun to gel. There she’s a thirty-two-year-old woman of Czech heritage, naturalized in 1902 and living in Shaker Heights with her husband, Arthur (described as a shoe store merchant), and their two boys, Arthur Jr., age six, and Paul, five. But even then there’s a snag: Arthur, then thirty-six, asserted that he was married for the first time seven years before, in 1923, at age twenty-nine; Theresa, though, revealed that she was first married at age nineteen—thirteen years earlier, in 1917, when she may have been as old as twenty-four.

Decades later the murkiness of her early life outlived her. Just ask her son: “My mother, on her deathbed, said, ‘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 eighty-three, she was eighty-seven.’ And her sister said, ‘Baloney! She was ninety-three!’”

T
HE WEDDING
of this rootless, pretty woman and her owlish, responsible husband would also provide a mystery: unique among their parents and siblings, they weren’t issued a marriage license in Cuyahoga County. Wherever the ceremony was held, it was almost certainly a civil one. Through his life Art belonged to the synagogue known as the Temple in the old Woodland Avenue Jewish enclave of west Cleveland, but his son Paul remembered, “[He] was not a religious man in the sense of going to synagogue or thrusting religion down our throats.” And Theresa would soon leave her native Catholicism for
Christian Science—the modern American spiritualist belief popular in the 1920s. She wasn’t so ardent as to deny her sons the benefits of medical care, as strict Christian Scientists would, and she seemed not to mind that her boys didn’t follow her faith. “That didn’t really take on me,” Paul would say of the religion (although he did declare himself a Christian Scientist on college applications, probably reckoning that claiming Jewish heritage would have put him at a disadvantage).
*

The prevailing religion of the household seemed, in fact, to be Americanism. The Newmans set about creating a tidy little family and situating it in increasingly comfortable houses. In January 1924 Arthur Jr. joined the family in the small, neat house on Renrock Road in Cleveland Heights. On January 26 of the following year, in snow and ice so daunting that Art and Theresa dared not venture out, Paul Leonard joined the family. Within two years he was tumbling and stumbling on the floors of the Newmans’ dream house in Shaker Heights—the only childhood home he would ever remember.

I
N THE SUMMER OF 1946, TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD NAVY VETERAN
Paul Newman handwrote an application to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Asked to provide a short autobiography, he began, “My life from the beginning has been uneventful and sheltered, my environment always clean and pleasant. My father is a self-made man with a remarkable fund of knowledge at his disposal, my mother is understanding and intelligent.”

And indeed he had no reason not to be satisfied with his situation. The success of Newman-Stern meant that the family had all they could want in the way of clothes, furniture, food. Theresa didn’t have to work outside the home, and she had live-in domestic help in the person of Ruth Bush, a teenage housemaid originally from Pennsylvania. There was a membership at the Oakwood Club in Cleveland Heights, and Theresa eagerly attended the road-show plays staged at the Hanna Theater in downtown Cleveland. The mailman regularly delivered
Fortune, Time, Life
, and
Reader’s Digest.
In the summertime the boys attended a camp in Michigan. The family traveled to Colorado, Florida, Quebec, and Chicago, where they dined in the famed Pump Room. (“This was
the
place then,” Paul remembered on a later visit, “one of the legends.”)

The house, the money, the luxuries, the travel, the security, the ease: all of it would have been heavenly to Theresa Newman. Why shouldn’t it have been? She had been brought across the world on the outside chance of what might come true, and here she was, still youthful, living
a dream, with a family of her own to share it. Still, the idea that she may have been interested overly in the things that money can buy caused discomfort for her son. “She was raised in a very poor family,” Paul explained decades later, “and had a sense of values that we pooh-pooh right now—you know, materialistic things, trying to get two cars in the garage.”

Perhaps that’s why his favorite memories of his boyhood would so often be set out of doors. Shaker Heights was genteel and grand, yes, but it was still in Ohio, and it provided an Eden for a knockabout pair like Paul and his brother, Art. “We would explore lakes and forests,” Paul recalled. “You could almost see the Indians hunting there and fishing.” The Newman boys and their dog, Cleo, were outside all the time, even in the coldest weather that the winds of Lake Erie could dish out. Paul especially recalled tobogganing and skating on frozen ponds and scaring neighborhood girls with jack-o’-lanterns on Halloween nights.

And when it wasn’t wintertime activities, it was organized team sports. Surely the sons of
the
Newman of Newman-Stern would be drawn into team games, in an era when American manly vitality expressed itself so sensationally in athletics. But there was a problem. “My brother and I,” Paul would say, “we both went in for every single sport you could think of. And
I
was terrible at all of them. Really—notoriously ungifted.” He played baseball, football, and basketball, but in none did he ever feel fluent or graceful or even able. It had partly to do with youthful klutziness: “Boy, was I accident-prone. If there was a tree with a creaky limb, you could be sure that was the one I would pick to climb, and snap!” But it was partly due to self-consciousness too. He had developed into a critic of himself, seeing flaws where others might have seen mere ordinariness.

It made him reticent, cautious, a little introverted. Hugh Leslie, who grew up five houses away from the Newmans on Brighton Road and was in Paul’s grade through high school, remembered, “He wasn’t shy, but I think he was more on the quiet side, the humble side. He participated in school activities, but he wasn’t gregarious or real outgoing.” The Newmans, he said, “were good people, good neighbors,” but Paul never particularly stood out.

Worse, he grew late. He was a more or less average-size boy, but as a young teen he leveled off, causing him genuine agony in the thing he most loved. “I wanted to play football so bad,” he remembered. “And I played in junior high school.” Don Mitchell, the captain of that junior high team, had strong memories of Newman’s ability. “He played center for us, and he wasn’t afraid of anybody,” Mitchell recalled. “He could really hit people. He was built. He could have wrestled.” But he stayed small, and it cost him. “In high school, in the ninth grade,” Paul remembered, “I still weighed ninety-eight pounds and was about five foot three. So I had to get a special dispensation so I wouldn’t have to play with the lightweights, because the lightweights were all sixth graders. And I was fucked if I was going to play with those guys.” The dispensation didn’t come: he never did play organized sports in high school.

But he had started to blossom in other ways, ways less interesting to a rollicking boy, perhaps, but readily noticed by a mother. “He was such a beautiful little boy,” Theresa Newman told a reporter in 1959. “In a way it was a shame to waste so much beauty on a boy.” He also became one of those people who struggled against a native reticence by overcompensating, in certain situations, as a gadabout or a show-off. He wasn’t comfortable in his own skin, but in the right circumstance he could don another and let himself go. “Paul was the neighborhood clown,” Theresa remembered. “He yodeled and sang and acted in all sorts of little neighborhood stunts.”

His youthful exhibitionism spilled onto the stage. At Malvern Elementary School he performed as an organ grinder in a class play, bouncing about and singing mock-Italian. (“I made up in volume what I lacked in tone,” he recalled.) When he was seven, he appeared as a court jester in a play entitled
The Travails of Robin Hood
, singing a song written especially for the occasion by his uncle Joe. “I didn’t like it,” Paul later said. “I felt as uncomfortable and disturbed then as I do now when I’m onstage. I had one entrance and one exit. I was a big hit. My family was hysterical with pride and admiration.”

Surely Theresa was the proudest and most admiring. “She was a frustrated actress, I guess,” Paul said, and she saw in him a channel for her blunted ambitions. When he was eleven, she enrolled him in the
Curtain Pullers, a newly organized program in which children studied and performed at the renowned Cleveland Play House. “The Play House was a first-rate regional theater, and everybody who was in those classes felt they were lucky,” remembered Joel Katz, who joined the Curtain Pullers about five years after Paul and later adopted the stage name Joel Grey.
*
“We went to class on Saturday mornings, and then we had productions on Saturdays, and some of us had roles in the grown-up productions that the Play House put on.”

On Halloween morning 1936 Paul made his debut as the human lead in
St. George and the Dragon
by Alice Buchan. He wore a florid costume and poured salt on the Dragon’s tail. “I wanted to play the Dragon,” he moaned mockingly years later. “It was a meatier part. But I was too big for the costume.” (Even then, a preteen, he considered himself a character actor in a leading man’s body.) Bill DeMora, who played the Dragon in that production, didn’t recall being able to fit the costume any better than Paul, whom he remembered as “just a little guy, a couple of years behind me.” But he did recall that the death of the Dragon was a highlight of the show. “I was this bad guy kind of taking over, and he slew me.” Paul too remembered it as a success: “I was a big hit.” But again he had reservations: “I didn’t enjoy it, and I wouldn’t enjoy it now.”

It’s clear that even at a young age he had an acute self-awareness and a sense of what behavior was and wasn’t appropriate in front of other people. By all accounts, people enjoyed watching him perform. But somehow he seems to have acquired the idea that doing it at all, even well, was inappropriate or unbecoming. Maybe it was because he was the pretty younger brother who took more than just the usual ribbing from his older sibling; describing Art Jr. years later, Paul called him “belligerent” and a “fierce son of a bitch.” Too, Art Jr. wasn’t the student his younger brother was. “Art was always in trouble in school,” remembered a classmate. “A fun guy, but as sharp as Paul was, Art was
not.” In all likelihood a regular diet of teasing and torment was on the menu.

But Paul’s self-consciousness might also have stemmed from the different attitudes his parents held toward the very idea of acting. As his youthful passion for performing turned into a young man’s intention to be involved with the theater, Theresa, her son remembered, was “supportive,” but Art considered it all to be nothing more than “star-gazing.” And that would be the opinion that mattered, because, as Paul himself put it, “I’m my father’s boy.”

F
OR ALL
the encouragement his mother gave him to think well of himself and to express himself in front of others, Paul Newman’s memories of childhood and youth would always be dominated by the figure of Art Newman Sr. For the rest of his life, Paul would speak admiringly of Art’s bookish intelligence, his high moral standards, his discreetly but firmly held convictions, his gentle sense of humor, his diligence, and especially his impeccable reputation for honesty and integrity. And he would speak too of the distance between them. “I don’t know that we ever connected as father and son,” he reflected years later, and he would always be haunted by that failure.

Sometimes he seemed to put the blame on Art, depicting him as “a very shy, very uncommunicative man.” But Art Jr. disagreed with that characterization. “Dad was undemonstrative, not uncommunicative,” he observed. More tellingly, Art Jr. said of his dad, “Like Paul, he was quiet.” So maybe the gulf between Paul and his dad was just a simple case of two taciturn types who were unable to tell each other what they really thought or felt. Whatever the reason, Paul saw in his father’s cool attitude a stamp of disapproval. He was painfully aware of his own flaws and shortcomings, and he felt that Art too saw them plainly. So he came to blame himself for the tone of dismissiveness he felt emanating from his father. “He worked six days a week in those days,” he remembered, “and I didn’t know what was going on, either with myself or with the outside world. I don’t think he had the patience to deal with things in a superfluous way—which, again, isn’t a criticism of him. It’s a criticism of myself.” Indeed, along with an ardent work
ethic, Art Newman’s lesson to keep one’s head down and not crow over triumphs or good fortune became ingrained in his boys. Paul’s deep-seated lifelong humility about his achievements was no act but rather a significant inheritance from his father.

Both Paul and his brother enjoyed visits from their uncle Joe, who was always a light spirit, a grown-up genuinely interested in whatever kids thought or imagined. He was an especially keen tour guide to books, Paul recalled: “He had an informal way of talking about the great writers that brought them alive to us. He gave me insights into literature that I didn’t get from any of the teachers at school.” Young Paul was a great one for reading: “When I was a kid,” he later reflected, “I used to go up into the attic with a good book, a glass of iced tea, and a bowl of popcorn.”
*

Art Newman’s lessons to his boys, on the other hand, would be remembered not for playfulness or the sense of wonder they imparted but for their moral dimension. “He was still suffering from the old Judeo-Christian guilts and the feeling that for anything to be meritorious it would have to be painful,” Paul recalled. (“I certainly have lived up to that,” he added ruefully.) Art was a quiet, determined, and upright man, and in his deep-set eyes his sons took measure of their worth. He made sure they learned to live his example, regardless of the family’s economic advantages. “I didn’t get my first baseball glove until I was ten,” Paul remembered. “This was intended as a lesson. Just because your father’s shop was crammed with sporting gear, it didn’t mean that baseball mitts grew on trees.” Art worked his sons on Saturdays at Newman-Stern, starting them earlier in the day, keeping them later, and paying them less than other employees. And Paul would keep other jobs during his school years: a paper route, a job selling Fuller brushes, and a stint as counterman at Danny Budin’s Jewish deli in Shaker Heights, the first recorded instance of his famous love of food. (“It was a toss-up whether he drew in pay as much as he ate,” his old
boss would say.) “I was always working, a lot of heavy work on bicycles,” Paul said. “That’s what I remember about my childhood.”

The emphasis on hard work would take on new meaning before the Newmans had spent even three years in Shaker Heights. The stock market crash of 1929 and the downward economic spiral that followed hit the blossoming suburb very hard. The school system shrank by 25 percent, and those employees who remained were paid partly in scrip. Improvements to the rapid train line ceased. Homes were lost. Plans to expand the city were scrapped.

Art Newman must have been mortified. He hadn’t all that long ago spent his life’s savings on an upscale home for his young family—how was he to maintain his situation at a time when people were worrying about buying bread and milk, let alone catchers’ mitts and crystal radio sets? But Newman-Stern, to Paul’s unending admiration and appreciation, survived, and the Newmans remained in their “clean and pleasant” home. “I never came home and found there was no food on the table,” Paul remembered, “but we felt the pinch.” He added, “I saw my father going to work and knew what a struggle it was for him.”