Paul Newman (4 page)

Indeed, it was a near thing for Newman-Stern. In the first years of the Depression, upward of 80 percent of the nation’s sporting goods retailers went bust. Newman-Stern, however, had Art’s good business sense and sterling reputation to rely upon. In 1931, on what Paul remembered as “a messy winter day,” Art, “looking as gray as the day itself,” left home for Chicago to negotiate a unique deal with Spalding and Wilson, the two enormous sporting goods manufacturers. When he returned, it was in triumph. Both companies had agreed to consign goods to Newman-Stern—to give the store a line of credit, in effect, for more than $150,000 worth of goods. For the rest of his life Paul would recollect this as a moment of great triumph for his father. Yes, Spalding and Wilson had fewer customers than ever and surely were thus more willing to extend themselves in order to hold on to them. But in Paul’s eyes the deal proved not the dire straits of the recreational gear business but the depth and renown of Art Newman’s character: “Spalding and Wilson knew that if he sold a glove for $3.95, they’d get their $2.50.”

During this period, Paul caught glimpses of Art’s politics; he would
recall that his father was “Rooseveltian” and more: “I never heard my father discuss politics in the home, but I know he was a liberal, perhaps even a socialist.” What impressed him most, though, was Art’s tenacity and integrity and the fact that those two combined to keep Newman-Stern in business when so many like operations went under. Over the years Paul would speak fondly of the shop—“one of the greatest sporting goods stores in the country,” he would brag, and “it was a marvelous shop and sold all kinds of things”—but Art’s success in securing those letters of agreement particularly stood out, and his son would relate it with pride for the rest of his life.
*

P
AUL, OF COURSE
, had no such laudable achievements to his credit. He hadn’t done anything in sports. He was merely an adequate scholar: “I was always one of those students of whom it was said, ‘He is very promising,’” he said, suggesting, in typically self-effacing fashion, that the promise was rarely fulfilled. Girls around Shaker Heights knew who he was but not necessarily in a way that led to romance. According to Peggy Behrens, a high school classmate, “Nobody really noticed him at that time. You heard talk later about his blue eyes, but none of the girls ever talked about them back then. And he didn’t look like a football player with broad shoulders or anything.” Jane Connolly, another classmate, remembered him distantly: “There was something dangerous about him. You felt he was not really tamed, that just beneath the surface there was a streak of violence. He was very popular—there were a lot of girls who wanted to date him—but he wasn’t a chaser.” Don Mitchell remembered him as one of the unattached clutch of boys at high school socials. “He was no Beau Brummel,” he said. “He used to come to all the dances like every other guy, and he’d be in the stag line with the rest of us.”

Paul noticed the girls but felt hopelessly outclassed by them: “Most of them towered over me.” So rather than suffer the rejections of girls, he found other ways to be popular and get noticed. He turned his job at Danny Budin’s deli into a showcase. “He would bow deeply to the customers and smile constantly as though he knew he was always on display,” remembered his boss.

In fact, the idea of being on display appealed to him—so long as he was on display in the persona of somebody else. In time the theatrical impulse that led his mother to steer him toward the stage took hold in his own heart. By his teens the worst of the Depression was over, and Shaker Heights High School had reinstituted its fine programs of the 1920s, in particular its drama program. Denied football as an outlet but itchy to do something big, Paul became part of that little world of kids, found at every high school, who put on shows. “I stage-managed and acted in plays in the usual extracurricular routine,” he would recall, “and I remember that one of my big disappointments was not getting the role of the First Gravedigger in
Hamlet.”
He watched on, rather, as Jack Foley, the young Barrymore of the Shaker High drama club, played the lead; he did, however, land a role in the play
Black Flamingo
meaty enough for him to be photographed for the school newspaper while rehearsing for it.

Whether or not they cast him in plum roles, his teachers thought well of him. “Paul’s outstanding quality was the seriousness with which he worked,” recalled William Walton, who taught drama at Shaker Heights High. “He was extremely intelligent and, unusual for a high school boy, was interested in serious drama.” But, Walton continued, he stood out in other ways, ways that made it clearer, perhaps, why he was drawn to acting: “He loved his fun. During rehearsal breaks he used to head for the piano and pound out boogie-woogie. A flock always gathered around.”
*

O
N
J
ANUARY
22, 1943, four days shy of turning eighteen, Paul got in the car with Art and drove to Athens, Ohio, where he’d been accepted into Ohio University. Anticipating his birthday, Paul had enlisted that morning in the navy—his brother, Art Jr., then a freshman in college, was just days away from joining the army—and he had decided to attend school while awaiting the call-up.

Ohio U was a big school in a little town, one of the largest universities in Ohio, a state full of colleges, and the oldest college in the midwestern region originally known as the Northwest Territory. It had been graduating students since 1815 and was known for its well-balanced liberal arts curriculum and the blossoming E. W. Scripps School of Journalism—a trade that might’ve drawn a young man with so many writers and newspapermen in his family.

But academics seemed not to matter to Paul, who by his own confession “majored in beer drinking” at such OU student haunts as the Sportsman Tavern in Athens. “Paul liked to quaff a few beers,” remembered Wanda Quest, an Athens girl he dated. Yes, during wartime, in college, there were girls—or more precisely, according to Newman’s version of the times, there were girls
around.
“A date back then was sitting around with a bunch of students, drinking beer or going to a film or [on] a hayride, or singing songs by the river,” he remembered. “Nice girls didn’t fool around, and nice guys didn’t try to fool around with nice girls. Them was the bylaws.”

He rushed a fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau, one of only three pledges in a time when so many young men were off at war. Wayne Blodgette, a fellow pledge, remembered him as a young rascal who liked to call himself Gus: “Gus was a good jazz pianist and played at our parties. He improvised, never read music, and liked boogie-woogie … Gus wasn’t a wild student—just the usual amount of drinking parties—and he had no problem with his studies.”

The piano playing was a running theme. Edith Quest, Wanda’s mom, remembered how the young man would come over to the house for dinners and “used to make our old upright piano jump.” Wanda
would recollect him as “a good dancer,” adding, “He had a very carefree attitude, wonderful personality and a laugh that was infectious.”

Away from home, beyond Art’s disapproving gaze and Theresa’s uncomfortable materialism, he was blossoming, even if he had to invent an alter ego—Gus—in which to do so. He was technically a business major, but as in high school he was drawn to the theater. Though only a freshman, he auditioned for a play,
The Milky Way
, a comedy about the boxing world by Lynn Root and Harry Clork, and he was given a lead role: Speed McFarland, the middleweight champ. College seemed to be bringing his native talents to the surface.

And then, on June 6, 1943, almost immediately after the term ended, he was called up to the navy.

Just eighteen, he was off to war.

“I
COULDN’T WAIT TO BE A PILOT
,” N
EWMAN REMEMBERED.
“I loved to fly.”

Having volunteered for the Navy Air Corps, the eager recruit found himself sent to Yale University in Connecticut, marking his very first visit to the state from which so many of the original settlers of Cleveland had migrated. He had gone there hoping to advance to flight school, but his dreams of becoming a flyboy died a quick and ironic death. A routine eye test revealed that the blue eyes that would someday become world famous were, in fact, color-blind: he was booted from the flight school portion of the training and into the more general V-12 Officer Candidate School, a sort of fast-track operation for college boys who were prospective officer material, also based at Yale.

It wasn’t a good fit. “They didn’t know what to do with me,” he recalled. For starters, he was still the scrawny kid who was too small to play football back in Shaker Heights; he cut a comic figure as a military man. “The first time I got in my uniform,” he continued, “I was walking down to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. A guy looked over at me, and I thought he was gay or something. I had my sailor outfit, my hat on. He looked at me and said, ‘Aren’t you a little old to be in the Sea Scouts?’”

Soon enough it was determined that he wouldn’t make a proper officer, so he was sent to a traditional navy boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island (it’s said that one of his instructors there was a stern-jawed
fellow by the name of Robert Stack), and then on to more specific training as a rear-seat radioman and gunner in torpedo bombers. In all, his training took him to Newport, Jacksonville, Miami, Norfolk, and San Diego. Qualified as an aviation radioman third class, Newman was shipped out to Barber’s Point, Hawaii, and assigned to a series of Pacific-based torpedo squadrons; he and his crewmates were responsible chiefly for training replacement pilots and air crewmen in a variety of skills, including carrier landings. The various units in which he served moved west with the progress of the war: Eniwetok, Guam, Okinawa, and finally Saipan, where they arrived in January 1945 and would remain until the Japanese surrender.

Throughout the war, Newman was assigned to routine patrols in torpedo bombers, aircraft intended to seek out and sink enemy ships and submarines: the sort of hairy business that could make a young man’s blood race. Unfortunately, he rarely rose to the tasks set before him. “I was a pretty good radio man but a terrible gunner,” he remembered years later. And he wasn’t much help to his crewmates when it came to the puzzle of reading their instruments, either: “I made errors in altimeters. When I thought we were at the moment of contact, the altimeter read that we were two or three hundred feet under water, in the sea! And the pilot is sitting up there chortling to himself and having a great time.”

So it was probably a good thing that he and his crewmates didn’t see any significant action. “I think we took some potshots at submarines that we saw,” he recalled. “A couple of times, flying over Saipan, we saw some Japanese guys and we strafed them. I had a .30-caliber machine gun in the tail, which, of course, was like a peashooter. It was the same as pissing into a propeller.”

He would later sum it all up as “mostly years of frustration.” But the sentiment wasn’t shared back in Shaker Heights, where Art and Theresa Newman were cross with him for signing up for a genuinely dangerous job. “I don’t think they ever forgave me for volunteering for torpedo duty,” Newman remembered much later. “That was not fair to either of them. That worried them and pissed them off.”

And they likely couldn’t imagine the other sorts of peril he faced. Years later Newman related to Gore Vidal the story of a particular
encounter he had at sea. “I went up on deck with a copy of Nietzsche to improve my mind,” he said; once there he was approached by a chaplain who sat beside him to speak about the book and then made a sexual advance.

“Now
that
really put me off,” Newman said.

“Off Christianity or homosexuality?” Vidal asked.

“Neither,” Newman replied.
“Nietzsche.”

When the
Enola Gay
dropped its famous payload on Hiroshima on August 7, 1945, Newman and his squad mates were aboard the aircraft carrier
Hollandia
, cruising about five hundred miles off the coast of Japan. A photograph taken of the celebration belowdecks shows a cohort of big, strapping sailors with mustaches and sideburns and old-fashioned anchor tattoos and, among them, a kid with arms like pipe cleaners and a wide, goofy grin on his face: Newman might have been the orphan they’d taken on board as a mascot during their journeys, possibly the youngest guy on the ship.
*

When his squadron broke up, Newman was assigned to a Carrier Aircraft Service Unit operating out of Seattle. There he took on the dreary shipyard tasks of servicing, repairing, and rearming various vessels; on the side, he ran a little business smuggling whiskey onto the base, as he confessed years later. On January 21, 1946, he was honorably discharged at Bremerton, Washington, with five fairly ordinary citations to his name: a Navy Combat Action Ribbon, the American Area Campaign Medal, the Asian Pacific Campaign Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. He headed back home, intending to resume his schooling.

I
F HIS
service record was relatively undistinguished and his experience of the war dull, his three-year tour of duty had its effect. For starters, he grew. He liked to joke that he was so undersize and under-developed
that he “got through the whole war on only two razor blades.” But in fact he shot up five or six inches and bulked up accordingly. (His Ohio U pal Wayne Blodgette saw him on-screen a few years later and immediately thought, “The navy must have really developed him.”) From the time he left Washington and for the rest of his life, he would reckon himself to be five foot ten or eleven and to weigh in the neighborhood of 160 pounds. (Decades later he claimed his navy uniform still fit him.)

And he learned a brief and slightly painful lesson about matters of the heart. He’d been involved with a girl back in Ohio—“very attached” is how he put it—and about midway through his service he got sucker-punched. “There I was,” he remembered, “in the middle of the Pacific, and I opened this
letter
that went something like ‘Dear Paul, I don’t know how to break this to you, but I have met someone who loves me very much and wishes to marry me.’ I went and had a few drinks, and when I woke up the next morning I was feeling no pain at all. It was over, just like that.” (Here’s hoping the choice that this mysterious lass made turned out to be a happy one.)

That wasn’t the only letter he would recall. Just as he would write to his brother Joe to keep him abreast of developments at Newman-Stern whenever the latter was away on business or pleasure trips, Art Newman wrote to his two boys in the service regularly. “My father wrote us every single day,” Newman said. “Every day for three years he wrote us a letter. If you go back and look at the letters, they were distant. There was no familial kind of sense to them. But there was an obligation to somehow remind us that there was somebody back home that was thinking about us.” That sense of diligence and duty—even if it was cool in its emotions—struck a deep chord, another lesson Art Newman taught his youngest son through deeds and not words: the sheer duty of a thing needed to be seen to, whether or not it was heartfelt or even heartening.

He learned something else, not exactly a lesson: during his time in the navy Newman came to consider himself lucky. For the rest of his life he would tell the story of the day in May 1945 when he and his crewmates were assigned, along with the rest of their squadron, to practice landings on the aircraft carrier
Bunker Hill.
That morning,
the pilot of Newman’s plane woke up with an earache, and their plane was grounded. Just a few days later two kamikaze planes attacked the
Bunker Hill
and killed nearly four hundred sailors, including the entire contingent from Newman’s squadron—one of the worst kamikaze attacks in the entire war. As he reflected upon one telling, “When you miss something like that because your pilot happened to have an earache
… wow
!”

The incident marked perhaps the most dramatic example of what he would come to call Newman’s Luck, a lifetime of fortunate turns that started with his very genes—the eyes, the lean frame—and came to include various incidents that led to specific circumstances that defined him. He didn’t read anything more than happenstance into it. “I’m not a religious person,” he would explain. “You can’t say God is looking after
you
because He gave your pilot an earache but put the fifteen other guys in coffins.” But he was certain that serendipity seemed to favor him; for what purpose or reason he could not say.

I
T WASN’T
Newman’s Luck that brought him to apply to Kenyon College in the summer of 1946. It was, rather, the simple fact that the school had no female students. As he considered the possibility of returning to Ohio University, he reflected that he had “become much more interested in the ladies than I was in my studies.” Kenyon, a much smaller, all-male school in the hamlet of Gambier, would, he hoped, be more free from female temptation. It was a strange claim—why wouldn’t a twenty-one-year-old navy veteran want to be around women?—but he unswervingly swore it was the case.

It was certainly the way Kenyon intended its students to live. The school had been founded in 1824 by an Episcopalian clergyman from New England named Philander Chase who sought to establish a “Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Ohio.” With money raised from English subscribers (including a generous donation from one Lord Kenyon), Chase built a small and beautiful campus on a hill in the Kokosing River Valley, roughly midway between Cleveland and the state capital at Columbus. Over time the school shed most of its religious trappings, although chapel attendance
was required until the 1960s, and it was always linked with other nearby colleges—Antioch, Denison, Oberlin, Ohio Wesleyan, and Wooster—in what was known as “the Ohio six,” a group of small liberal arts schools with religious origins.

Kenyon was an absolutely idyllic place, a cluster of stone buildings that looked like they’d been there for centuries and bled seamlessly into Gambier, where horses still pulled carts up and down the modest main street, often with Amish or Mennonite riders holding the reins. At the school’s gates the quaint town road turned into Middle Path, the spine of the campus, which was plotted around it in a subtle grid. Perched high on a hill and miles from the nearest thing you would call a town, the college was dominated by Old Kenyon, a large and imposing gothic structure that contained classrooms, dormitories, and common spaces. Beside the campus chapel lay a pioneer cemetery, its headstones decayed into stubs by the passing decades.

By the time Newman wrote out his application, Kenyon had grown in size and developed fine programs in business, divinity, and, especially, English: the famed
Kenyon Review
was first published there in 1939, and the faculty boasted such impressive icons of American letters as John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Allen Tate. The New Criticism, the chief American school of literary thought of the postwar period, was virtually invented at Kenyon and thrived in a summer institute, the Kenyon School of English, which brought to campus such notables as Robert Frost, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren.

Most all of those names probably meant nothing to Newman, although he was an avid reader while in the navy and claimed, in his Kenyon application, to have recently read, among other books,
Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov; Native Son; I, Claudius; Of Human Bondage; Fathers and Sons;
and
The Decameron.
He acknowledged an interest in the theater—“my main extracurricular activity has always been dramatics”—but he declared that his purpose for attending college was more practical: “After absorbing a broad education I intend to take a postgraduate course in Business Administration, [to] enter the retail merchandising field, and later, perhaps, to hold an executive position with a large department store.” In short, he’d go into
the family business, just as had always been intended. Before that time came, though, Newman would enjoy what he would later describe as the happiest days of his life.

A
S YOUNG
men like Newman returned from the war with GI Bill benefits that could be used toward tuition, Kenyon’s enrollment had exploded, so the school had knocked together some makeshift dorms—barracks, essentially—to house not only single students but also some married young men with their families. Newman was assigned to live in one of these, the building known as T-Barracks because of its shape.
*
Very quickly he reclaimed his Ohio U reputation as a bon vivant, a joker, and a stirrer of high spirits—literally and figuratively. Once again he recollected college as a fine place to indulge in beer drinking. (He was inordinately fond of saying that he graduated Kenyon “Magna Cum Lager” or alternately “Magna Cum Kindness-of-Their-Hearts.”) But this time his antics led to a paper trail and, indeed, a change in life.