Paul Newman (31 page)

But she made sure that Newman took on his share of the burdens, feelings of inadequacy included. “Sometimes I come home,” he said, “and there’s this woman wandering around the house muttering ‘What am I doing cooking for seven people? What the hell am I doing?’” And worse, when he would insist on a little time off after a movie job, to go drinking and fishing and racing cars, he often did so without recognizing that he was offering his wife the merest short end of a stick. “For chrissakes,” she complained to a reporter once, “he has been gone all fall on location with his new movie and then he comes home for two weeks, you know, like King Faisal, and then off he goes again on vacation. I said, ‘When do I get my vacation?’”

He learned to make space for her needs—gladly, even. Having severely tested his wife at least once, having become wealthy and given up hard liquor and begun to talk about himself as an Old Fox, he settled into his marriage as a staple of his life and became, at nearly fifty, the sort of old married man who listened to his wife and usually answered “yes dear” when she spoke. And as long as she let him raise a little hell with the boys now and then, they were both content.

B
ACK IN 1969, ON THE HEELS OF MAKING
WINNING
,
N
EWMAN
treated himself to a brand-new Corvette Sting Ray, and he drove it from Westport to Lime Rock, a quarry town in the Berkshire foothills of northwest Connecticut. His destination was Lime Rock Park, a 325-acre racetrack that had been built on the site of a gravel pit about a decade prior. The track was available once a week for anybody who wanted to pay a fee and test out their wheels or their driving skills. Newman had a yen to do both, but he didn’t want to look like a fool. So he approached Jim Daley, who ran the track, and asked him for some pointers. Daley in turn introduced him to Bob Sharp, a racer, auto dealer, and racing-team owner who often gave driving lessons to wealthy guys with a jones to go fast.

One thing Sharp wasn’t was a film buff; introduced to Newman, he reacted to him as if he was just another guy, which naturally Newman loved. “The name didn’t register, ring a bell, whatever,” Sharp explained. He gave Newman some tips, and he treated him with no special deference—“This is not a publicity stunt,” he warned his new pupil, once he realized who he was. Newman, always an apt and determined student, learned and thrived. “He was higher than a cloud,” Sharp remembered. “All of a sudden a vehicle becomes the medium that lets you show that athlete you want to be.”

If he’d merely been exposed to the racing bug during the making of
Winning
, now Newman had caught it for good. Back in California working on film projects, he ran some laps at the Ontario Motor
Speedway and wound up taking a spot on the board of directors of the track, along with other celebrities who liked driving such as Kirk Douglas and Dick Smothers. In the spring and summer of 1970, when he was working on
Sometimes a Great Notion
in Oregon, he returned to Ontario as often as possible and drove in a race to raise money for charity along with James Garner, Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, Robert Wagner, Pancho Gonzalez, and a complement of race-world superstars.

For most of those other actors, racing was a rush and a goof: they did it only occasionally and for fun. Newman, though, was getting more serious. In late 1970 he traveled throughout the United States and even to Germany, visiting a variety of tracks and driving a variety of cars on them; he had a small film crew in tow, with an eye toward turning the footage into a TV special.
*
In the summer of 1971 he again found time to get out to Lime Rock and Ontario and other tracks, and his driving was showing steady signs of improvement.

He was well and truly caught up in it: it was a real hobby, to rival beer drinking as his favorite pursuit. And it was an escape from Hollywood and a houseful of kids, carrying the savor of danger and thrills, steeped in macho liveliness and male camaraderie. “Some people play golf,” he said. “I like cars. It’s just kicky, very natural. It may not offer as much exercise as some sports, but I love it.”

Joanne, predictably, was made anxious by his choosing to risk his neck like this—and at an age where most drivers would concede that they were losing sharpness of vision and reflexes. “She thinks it’s the silliest thing in the world,” Newman said. “It’s also very scary to her, and she doesn’t much care for it.” But that didn’t deter him. Nor did the very real specter of life-threatening injuries. The columnist Earl Wilson visited Newman and his producing partner, John Foreman, that year, and the talk turned to motor sports. “It is dangerous, isn’t it?” Wilson asked.

“Oh, something could break, I suppose,” Newman replied. “But as for driving, I’m not off the road a lot.”

“Two drivers we used in
Winning
got killed,” Foreman interjected.

“Not in the picture,” Newman shot back. “They went on to another race and got killed.”

“They
did
get killed,” Foreman replied.

But Newman wasn’t afraid of the potential harm that could come to him; like the terrier to which he was so fond of comparing himself, he had the scent of auto racing and was determined to go after it.

I
N LATE
1971 Newman approached Bob Sharp with a proposition: he would lease a Datsun 510 race car from Sharp and pay to have it prepared and maintained by his mechanics. Thus equipped, Newman planned to devote himself in the summer of 1972 to driving on the Sports Car Club of America circuit, in which amateur competitors raced in a half-dozen regions of the country in order to accumulate points that would qualify them for a series of national championship races held annually outside Atlanta. He went to the SCCA training schools in Connecticut and New Hampshire and was admitted to the rolls as a driver.

That summer he entered a number of races at Lime Rock and took the same sort of attitude toward them as he had toward sessions at the Actors Studio twenty years before: watching, absorbing, going step-by-step through his paces. Sam Posey, a professional driver, didn’t think much of Newman’s skill at the time: “He drove it smoothly—and slowly—seemingly oblivious of the other cars around him. He rarely fought for a position.”

But Newman, knowing his own learning curve, stuck to his plan. “Like everything else,” he’d say of his driving

He took that philosophy to the track with him that summer. “I particularly wanted to avoid the trap of getting in over my head just to satisfy what other people might have thought I should be doing,” he explained.

By 1973 he was confident enough to enter more races around New England and at the Nelson Ledges race-way, about an hour southeast of Cleveland. (When he ran there, he often made a stop in Shaker Heights to visit his mom.) He managed to qualify for that fall’s SCCA championships—the Runoffs, as they were called—at the Road Atlanta race-way. But he didn’t fare well, skidding out into a dirt back in a practice run, in full view of a film crew, and finishing ninth in his class.

The following year movie obligations limited his ability to get back to Lime Rock and accumulate enough points to make it to the Runoffs. But he found other racing outlets—and got in a little too deep. In February he drove in a Porsche against the pros in the International Race of Champions at Daytona Speedway in Florida; he was a catastrophe, spinning out on the first turn, causing another driver to spin out later, and finally blowing his engine on just the sixth lap. (To make matters worse, the racer A. J. Foyt called him “Steve”—an obvious dig suggesting that Newman didn’t drive as well as Steve McQueen.)

He could squeeze in only the occasional race that summer, but in September he took on a truly foolish challenge. As part of a team of four drivers that included Graham Hill, who had twice won the championship of Formula 1, the most prestigious auto circuit in the world, Newman went out to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah in order to attempt to break seventeen speed records that had been set ages before and were rarely challenged because they were in such obscure categories.

The North American Racing Team, which drove Ferraris, sponsored the strange effort, and they had managed to bring Ragú spaghetti sauce on as a sponsor and CBS television along to film it for a special. Newman balked at the latter: “I’m not a professional driver and I don’t pretend to be as good as Graham …Just racing around out here with them is fun. But doing it in front of a national television audience where I’m the slow guy—or maybe I’m the guy who breaks the car—that’s showing my butt in a way that I’m not prepared to do.” Eventually his publicist, Warren Cowan, came out to Utah and negotiated a deal with CBS, allowing for Newman to be filmed in certain conditions.

In retrospect, he may have wished they hadn’t reached an agreement. He wasn’t driving badly, but the open course was pebbly and featureless and marked only by stakes with flags on them. Compared to the paved and maintained courses he’d been driving on, it was “like driving on the moon,” he told a reporter. “Like nothing I expected.” He wasn’t able to get up to the same speeds as Hill and the other pros, and his pride was hurting, until Hill pointed out, “Frankly, I’m bloody glad you’re not as fast as I am!” Still, he knew he’d stretched too far. “It really was a foul ball,” he confessed later. “I didn’t exactly drench myself with glory.”

The team suffered mechanical problems and had to settle for breaking only five of the low-hanging records they were shooting for. The only consolation Newman took away from the experience was the sheer pleasure of being among other members of the racing fraternity in a faraway location: hanging out at the Hideaway Lounge in Wendover, Utah, drinking beer and shooting pool and telling crude jokes and
laughing and whatnot. Inevitably he drew a crowd of local gawkers—one woman was seen retrieving his discarded apple core from a wastebasket. But the folks at the bar didn’t seem to think he was a big deal, and that pleased him immensely.

Indeed, as much as the driving, he seemed truly to love the atmosphere of racing—the vagabonding travel from one track to another in regular annual rhythms, the joking around in the pits and the garages, the long days of hanging out inside or outside or even on top of motor homes drinking beer and talking about cars and races and nothing in particular. At first he was considered a dilettante and a freak by a lot of the drivers and spectators, who harbored some resentment against a fellow with his money and creaky skills barging into their small world. “Sure he won,” griped a spectator at Lime Rock to a reporter. “So what. He’s got the best car money can buy. That’s a class for little guys, and he’s driving a car set up by Bob Sharp. Most of those other guys set up their own car in their backyard.”

But nobody who was around him much in the racing world ever felt he pulled rank or expected special treatment. Skip Barber, a veteran SCCA racer and champ who operated a driving school at Lime Rock, said, “There’s an awful strong sense of entitlement around Lime Rock. Everybody acts like it’s theirs. He didn’t do that. He was good for Lime Rock, and in turn people didn’t bother him. The road-racing community was good that way when it came to him.”

He did what he could to blend in, hiding his celebrity by racing under the name P. L. Newman. And as his driving improved, and as he demonstrated to members of the racing world that he was serious about learning the craft and not interested in publicity, his stature among them rose, and he became one of the boys. He swapped an ongoing series of practical jokes with SCCA racing rival Bob Tullius. Once he had a garbage truck painted with Tullius’s colors and number and arranged for it to take a ceremonial lap on the track before a race. Another time he hired an airplane to drag a banner through the sky over a raceway bearing the legend “Tullius Gobbles”; when Tullius pointed out how upset his mother would be to see such a lewd message, the plane returned the next day with a banner that read “Tullius: Call Momma.”

He barbecued steaks and his famous hamburgers for his race buddies; he had cases of Coors shipped in from Colorado for race weeks. He would sit around the Winnebago bullshitting and then stand up and stretch and say, “Well, the time has come for the old man to do a little driving,” and then go out and race hard and fast and sometimes quite well. He was in heaven—if only, perhaps, because he was away from the movies. “I enjoy the people in racing a lot more than the people in Hollywood,” he said. “It’s like being around circus people.”
*

A
LL OF
this running around—this literal running around—wouldn’t seem to leave him time for making films, but Newman was terrifically busy as an actor during the years in which he honed his racing skills. And even when the results weren’t of especially high quality, he reliably chose to make films that had a sense of purpose or potential to them. In most every case, you could see why he’d made a film and what he’d hoped it’d become.

In 1972 he made a pair of pictures back-to-back with John Huston, the larger-than-life character who’d debuted as a director with
The Maltese Falcon
and gone on to make
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Moulin Rouge, The Asphalt Jungle, The Night of the Iguana
, and, most recently,
Fat City.
Huston was a man’s man in a vein that Newman admired: a boozer, gambler, brawler, and womanizer with culture and huge appetites and no fear of pissing off Hollywood bigwigs and a knack for landing on his feet in the most improbable ways. They were meant to work together.