Paul Newman (48 page)

Russo was called to New York to give Benton some assistance with the script, which necessarily had cut chunks out of the book. When he got there, he recalled, “[Newman] immediately pigeonholed me and started asking me questions: What kind of music did Sully like? And things like this. I must have disappointed him, because I had to confess that everything I knew about that man was in the book.” The novelist stayed on to witness a bit of the shoot, and he was gratified to see that his initial impression of the casting of the central role had been mistaken. “I wasn’t looking at the physical man anymore,” he remembered. “He’d gotten inside the character. There’s something going on in him that connects not just to my rogues but to messed-up human beings of many sorts. He understands them.”

The picture filmed in several towns in the Hudson Valley in the winter of 1993–94, when so much snow fell that the crew not only had to return the snow-making equipment that had been rented as a safeguard but also had to come out daily and groom the locations to make the drifts on the streets resemble, as best they could, the way they’d
looked before the previous night’s accumulation. “The people who we’d hired to make snow wound up spending all their time removing it,” Benton recalled. “Otherwise it would have looked like we had filmed it in Alaska.”

Alongside Newman in a true ensemble cast were Melanie Griffith, Dylan Walsh, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Gene Saks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jessica Tandy, who didn’t let on to anyone involved in the production that she was battling cancer, a fight she would soon lose. (“She knew she was going into the hospital right after the film was over and gave no indication of that,” Newman recalled. “She was just this extraordinary presence.”) Also in the cast was Bruce Willis, who proudly revealed to Newman that they were actually working together for the second time: as a young extra, Willis had played a courtroom spectator in
The Verdict.
He was appearing in Benton’s film without billing and, in fact, without even seeing the part he’d play. “Robert Benton called me and said, ‘I’m doing this film with Newman,’” Willis remembered. “And I asked him, ‘Do I have any scenes with him?’ He said, ‘All your scenes are with him. Want to read it?’ I said, ‘No, I’m in. I’ll do it.’”

During filming Newman amused himself by playing Ping-Pong against his younger colleagues. “He took me out to dinner and challenged me to a game,” Hoffman remembered. “He beat me three times in a row. I remember him wanting to beat me—he was so competitive, and it was so much fun.” Newman laughed off the extreme weather—it was so cold, in fact, that a teardrop froze on Melanie Griffith’s cheek during one shot—and relished the excesses of his character, a boozy rake who flirts with his boss’s wife, delights in taunting the local cop, relies on an inept, one-legged drunken lawyer to fight his legal battles, and resolutely avoids anything like responsibility or emotional connection. “There’s a lot of the character,” he confessed, “that is closer to me than any role I’ve done… In his search for privacy, he starts putting up walls, and the unfortunate part of the process is at some point these walls break down. I’ve been there, and I know what it’s like.”

Newman gave credit to Benton for allowing him to build his performance delicately: “He allows things to develop. He just eavesdrops.”
But Benton said that Newman’s success was due to his innate empathy. “He has a real sympathy for people who get neglected,” the director said.

Despite the weather problems the film was finished on time and then got stuck in a kind of limbo as the producers and the studio battled over when to release it. The first thought was for an autumn premiere, but as admiring word for the film and, especially, Newman’s performance came back from early critics’ screenings, they considered holding it until the Christmas season, when Oscar candidates are traditionally released. That, finally, was the decision they made, and it turned out to be an inspired one.

Nobody’s Fool
got the best reviews of any film of Newman’s since
The Color of Money—
and maybe since
The Verdict.
Partly it was because the film was simply well made.
“Nobody’s Fool
is so eloquently straightforward, it practically sings to the soul,” wrote Deeson Howe in the
Washington Post.
The Internet-based critic James Berardinelli similarly stated,
“Nobody’s Fool
is about as sublime a motion picture as is likely to come out of Hollywood.” Newman, declared Edward Guthmann in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, was “an actor so masterful, so lacking in ostentation, that you barely notice he’s acting.” And Caryn James in the
New York Times
flat-out called Newman’s performance “the single best of this year.”

But partly, too, the affection for
Nobody’s Fool
was based on the knowledge that it offered a summation of Newman’s career that was unlikely to be equaled in another potential film. As Roger Ebert put it, casting his eye back to the 1950s, “Like Brando, Newman studied the Method. Like Brando, Newman looked good in an undershirt. Unlike Brando, Newman went on to study life, and so while Brando broke through and then wandered aimlessly in inexplicable roles… Newman continued to work on his craft. Having seen what he could put in, he went on to see what he could leave out. In
Nobody’s Fool
, he has it just about figured out.”

The film did nearly $40 million in business, and Newman reaped prizes to go with the praise: the best actor awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Berlin Film Festival and his ninth Oscar nomination as best actor. It looked like a reasonably competitive race,
with Newman and Tom Hanks
(Forrest Gump)
reckoned as favorites over Morgan Freeman
(The Shawshank Redemption)
, Nigel Hawthorne
(The Madness of King George)
, and John Travolta
(Pulp Fiction).
*
But Newman didn’t even bother attending the ceremony, spending Oscar night dining with family at the Russian Tea Room in New York while Hanks won the second of his back-to-back Academy Awards.

H
IS MIND
, in fact, was on newer and more exciting possibilities—an expansion of the Newman’s Own empire, in fact.

For years after graduating from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a degree in human ecology, Nell worked on bird conservation issues in her home on the central coast of California. The bohemian lifestyle she grew up with in Westport stood her in good stead in towns like Santa Cruz, and her way of life gave her a business idea. She lobbied her dad about the virtues of organic food and the idea of establishing a line of organic foods under the Newman’s Own label. But for years he had turned up his nose at her, declaring, “If it’s organic, it tastes bad.” Within the family Nell had taken up the duties of preparing holiday meals, and for Thanksgiving 1992 she had flown back east with her bags secretly stuffed with organic ingredients, including a free-range turkey. After they ate dinner, she asked Newman how he’d liked it. He allowed he’d liked it quite well, and then she told him that it had been entirely organic. He respected being hustled as much as he enjoyed the food, and he agreed to front her some seed money to see if there wasn’t some merit in her proposal. But he insisted that she and her business partner, Peter Meehan, who used to clean the Newmans’ pool, pay the investment back. “It’s charity money that I would have given away,” he reminded her.

Nell and Meehan took the loan—about $125,000—and researched the organic food field with an eye toward filling a hole in the market and complementing the existing line of Newman’s Own products. They hit on pretzels—after popcorn, Newman’s favorite snack food,
and a treat that was then enjoying a rise in popularity. Rather than produce some grainy health-food-store version, they came up with a recipe that resembled familiar mainstream supermarket pretzels but was made with organic ingredients. Newman approved of what they did and allowed them to launch themselves as a subdivision: Newman’s Own Organics—The Second Generation, with the motto “Great-tasting products that happen to be organic.” (Nell’s sister Lissy, then working as an artist and a singer, helped design the company logo, in which Newman and Nell posed in a parody of Grant Wood’s
American Gothic.
)

Newman presented only two stipulations. One was that Nell and Peter do some real good with their organic philosophy. “I don’t want you to save just one wheat field in Kansas,” he declared. “I want you to make a real difference.” The other was more in the way of a concession: “You don’t have to give the money to charity. You don’t have the income I do.” Nell balked: “Great, then I’ll be the only division of Newman’s Own keeping the money.” She announced that she would not only make donations of her profits but that she also would let her employees—the chef who developed the pretzel recipe, the packagers and the drivers—decide what to do with the profits. Newman was delighted.

The first line was a hit: within three years Newman’s Own Organics held a 75 percent share of the organic pretzel market. Newman bragged, “She’s cornered the market, run everybody else out of business, which I like. I like the barracuda aspect of her business.” They followed with chocolate bars, microwave popcorn, and cookies. The first cookies, Newman-O’s—organic versions of Oreos—were another success. Then they had an idea for a fig cookie and the inspiration to call it Fig Newmans; that would, they figured, entail a battle with Nabisco, whose Fig Newtons were obviously being invoked. Newman launched a personal campaign to win the corporation’s permission, writing directly to the president to explain why he thought Newman’s Own should be allowed to horn in on their trademark. “We were all on pins and needles about the name,” Nell remembered, “and he calls me up like a ninth-grader and says, ‘We got it!’”

The Fig Newman would, in fact, become one of the best sellers in the Newman’s Own Organics line, which went on to include produce,
olive oil, pet food, coffee—more than one hundred products in all. Nell ascribed the positive reception of Newman’s Own Organics products to the company’s trust of Paul Newman’s own tastes: “Everything had to be something that my father, who was born in 1925, would look at and recognize and eat.” (The mint-flavored Newman-O’s were, she said, his personal favorite.) And like the parent company, Newman’s Own Organics fulfilled multiple civic duties as it sold its wares: encouraging environmentally sensitive farming practices and supporting charities. In its first decade of existence it gave away close to $2 million.

The actual charitable arm of Newman’s Own had given away much more than that—more than $60 million in total by 1995. And Newman and Hotchner had begun to use their unbelievably profitable little company to do good in other ways. In 1992 they began to endow a First Amendment Prize administered through the PEN American Center, an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of writers; they focused their assistance on school librarians, bookstore owners, high school teachers, and independent journalists.

The unlikely enterprise had gotten so big that it had become worthy of study. In 1995 the School of Business at Fairfield University in Connecticut began working with Newman’s Own to teach the next generation of executives how to create and market new products and turn the profits into philanthropic donations. If the company actually took up any of the student proposals, it promised to turn whatever money was earned into scholarships for the school.

Somehow the little inspiration to start a company and give away the profits had become a model for others. Newman had, in effect, turned Newman’s Luck into a course of study, a career arc, and a way of life.

H
USBAND; FATHER; ACTOR; MOVIE STAR; SEX SYMBOL; ENTRE
preneur; philanthropist; film director; activist; champion driver; championship team owner; Oscar winner; national treasure: he had a lot of hats to choose among.

But one title had eluded him: grandpa.

That would change in the spring of 1996, when Lissy, the next-to-youngest of the five girls, gave birth to Peter Stewart Elkind and then, a couple of years later, another son, Henry. Lissy, the boys, and their father, schoolteacher Raphael Elkind, lived in the Newmans’ original Westport house—just over the footbridge from the new one—where Lissy kept busy with art and singing projects, including providing the voice of an AT&T advertising campaign that featured Joanne as well.

It was a curiosity that a man with six children, some already in their forties, should have had to wait so long for grandkids, but there were actually very few marriages among the Newman daughters. Nell had been married once briefly in the 1990s and then more permanently to Gary Irving, a Welshman who operated a shop in Santa Cruz where she bought surfing gear. Clea had been engaged back at Sarah Lawrence to a classmate and fellow equestrian—Marshall Field VI, no less—but five weeks before the wedding, which had been announced in the
New York Times
, she called it off; she ultimately married, for the first time, in 2003. Susan and Stephanie hadn’t married by the time Lissy had her boys.

Why not? All the girls were lovely, with their father’s fine features complemented, in Joanne’s daughters, by a pleasant softness around the cheeks and mouth and, in Jackie’s, by oval-shaped faces and slender eyes that gave them an exotic air. They were almost all active in the sorts of outdoor pursuits that the family favored, and they were accomplished in a variety of areas—if not exactly careers, then such worthy avocations as political and environmental activism, charity work, the arts. Nell, for instance, had kept up her ornithological pursuits and been involved with saving falcons in California before starting the organics business; Clea worked for a foundation that used horse riding as therapy for special needs children and then at a school for the autistic. They were also, of course, due to inherit money; even though he gave away his Newman’s Own profits and invested in race cars and racing teams, Newman had invested wisely—he would soon buy an interest in a Connecticut Volvo/Mazda dealership—and had become a wealthy man.

The girls were, in short, eligible. But they were unattached until strangely late in their lives. Perhaps potential suitors were simply cowed, as Scott seems to have been, by the prospect of measuring up to Newman. “It’s hard on my boyfriends,” Susan once said. “They feel compelled to live up to some sort of an image.” In her case, she said, she tended to gravitate toward men who were distinctly unlike her father. Growing up seeing women behaving in the most foolish fashion in front of Newman, she said, steered her toward “doggy-looking guys.” She explained, “I really don’t want to walk into a room with my boyfriend and know that five hundred women are dying to jump on him.” Hovering over it all, terribly, was the specter of Scott, the only boy among Newman’s six children and the one who, by tradition, should have carried on the family name and the male genes; perhaps his absence was an aspect of his sisters’ hesitancy toward marriage.

But whether they were being protective of their father or of themselves, or whether Newman made them feel that no man was quite good enough or Scott made them fear that no man could endure comparison with him, or maybe even whether the bohemian tenor of their upbringing made them feel that marriage and children were too traditional
to bother with, they remained for long periods on their own. And Lissy’s two boys would be the only children ever privileged to call Newman “Pop-Pop.”

T
HEN AGAIN
, there was nothing especially grandfatherly about him. The year before little Pete was born, for instance, Pop-Pop entered the history books as the oldest driver ever to win a sanctioned professional motor race. At the 24 Hours of Daytona, sharing the wheel with his Connecticut racing chum Michael Brockman, NASCAR veteran Mark Martin, and Trans-Am champ Tommy Kendall, Newman did approximately six hours of driving spread out over an entire day in a car that finished third overall and first in its class.
*
The Newman car, a Mustang, was plastered with an advertisement for
Nobody’s Fool
on its side. He was an old-timer, and he didn’t care who knew it.

As Jack Roush, who owned the car, remembered, when the drivers met for practice sessions, Newman seemed anxious about driving for a team that actually had a shot at winning such a prestigious race. “He was a little bit apprehensive,” Roush said. “He wasn’t on his game. From a race-car driver’s point of view or a pilot’s point of view, I think he was riding on the car instead of wearing it. To be really effective, you need to sense what’s going to happen with a certain input, and that’s when you start wearing it.”

In fact, he had reason to be chary; it had been nearly four years since the last time he’d won, in an amateur club race at Lime Rock. In 1994 he’d had some really poor luck. “I had six races and five crashes,” he said. “I think that somebody might be giving me a sign.” But he nonetheless enjoyed testing himself, and according to Roush, he did what he had to do to win at Daytona.

After his first one-hour stint behind the wheel, he seemed relieved simply to have gotten his feet wet. With each session he drove, his confidence improved. During the night portion of the race, he called
into his crew from the car to suggest that he was losing pace, but they told him that he was exactly where he needed to be; reassured, he came in for gas and new tires and went back out to put in a double shift. With about ninety minutes left in the race, he got out of the car after what he believed was his last run. “He gave a big sigh of relief—‘Wow, I’ve made it,’” Roush recalled. “He said, ‘Man, I’m glad it’s over.’ And I said, ‘It’s not over, Paul. You’re going to get in the car for the last forty-five minutes. You’re gonna finish this thing.’ He did, and he took that checkered flag.”

He had driven in bursts all through the day and the night at speeds well over 150 miles per hour, in darkness, without proper sleep, against pros, and he had won.

At age seventy.

T
HAT SAME
winter he became the owner of a new business, or rather the new owner of a venerable American business.
The Nation
, the progressive journal that had been published regularly since 1865, was being sold off by its publisher. Editor in chief Victor Navasky was seeking to round up a consortium of liberal sugar daddies who could buy the magazine—which, he admitted, had never been profitable in its history—and keep it afloat.

To that end, he requested a business dinner with Newman, and Newman—sensing, perhaps, that he was about to have the touch put on him—brought Joanne along. Navasky presented the situation, and Newman seemed to dig in his heels. He wanted to know why
The Nation
wasn’t run as a nonprofit; Navasky explained that by taking nonprofit status, the magazine would forfeit the right to endorse elective candidates or lobby for legislation. One by one Newman’s questions were parried and his doubts erased. And then came the question of money. Navasky outright asked Newman for $1 million. Newman was leery. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s pretty rich.” And Joanne piped up with the perfect rejoinder: “Yes, but you’re pretty rich, dear.”

Newman joined in with such fellow investors as the novelist E. L.
Doctorow and the actor Michael Douglas. He asked just one indulgence of management: the right to be able to publish the occasional essay on this or that issue in the public eye. He took the opportunity initially in 1997, imagining a series of hypothetical questions he would like to have asked Senator Jesse Helms if the conservative lawmaker had ever appeared before a Senate committee for a confirmation hearing. The following month he wrote a parodic attack on Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who suggested that Hollywood liberals could come up with the $10 billion used to fund the National Endowment for the Arts by donating 1 percent of their gross income.

Those two pieces—“hiccups,” as he described them—stood as his only contributions for a few years, until he started writing, again with tongue in cheek, about the political opinions of “my grandson, Pete,” who he claimed “is about to overtake Leonardo da Vinci both in art and science.” He even contributed little squigglelike cartoons over the years, with jokes about such topics as the impeachment of Bill Clinton. He saw it all in the spirit of playful public engagement, much like the humorous verse that his uncle Joe Newman had written about current events for Cleveland newspapers decades earlier. “If government is unable to give us government,” he wrote in one of his columns, “it ought, at least, to give us a few laughs.”

Briefly he almost allowed himself to be seduced by the idea of having a public platform. For more than a decade he had been in the habit of watching CNN while he did his morning exercise, and he gave some thought to becoming a commentator on the cable network. “I wrote a little essay about Star Wars or weapons systems or something, and I went down and taped it, and it was simply terrible. I was stiff and formal and unpersuasive. I looked at myself and I said, ‘I would not buy a used car from that man.’”

But he continued to speak out, lending his name, his money, and sometimes his face, voice, and presence to such causes as the plight of Haitian refugees, the effort to put limits on handgun ownership, wetland conservancy, clean air and water, and, as always, nuclear disarmament. He would occasionally stump for a favored political candidate, a very short list that came to include his brother, Art, who had retired
from the movie business, married a second time, and was running for a seat on the city council in Rancho Mirage, California.
*

And he was happy to lead through his example as much as through his fame or fortune. Along with John F. Kennedy Jr.’s
George
magazine, Newman encouraged the sort of corporate philanthropy that his food businesses epitomized. The Newman’s Own
/George
Award was an annual award for a corporation that practiced “innovative and significant philanthropy.” The prize of $25,000, to be presented to the charity of the winner’s choosing, was endowed by a $250,000 grant from Sony Electronics. The award was irresistible to the media, but it ceased after Kennedy’s death and the shuttering of his magazine.

Newman also continued his efforts to turn corporations into more responsible public citizens with his Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, an informational group that showed businesspeople how their companies might follow in the shoes of Newman’s Own. At the same time, he donated his time and image to Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a group formed by Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cofounder Ben Cohen to lobby Congress for tighter budgetary control of military spending and the reassignment of excesses from the defense budget to schooling programs and health care for children.

T
HROUGHOUT IT
all—the family changes, the racing, the political activity, the ongoing expansion of Newman’s Own, the process of aging into his seventies—he was still a working actor.

Sometimes it was a lark, such as when Joanne appeared as Abby Brewster, one of the homicidal aunties in
Arsenic and Old Lace
, in a 1995 production at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. In an old tradition associated with the play, the curtain call on opening night was marked by a stagehand opening the door to the basement, where Abby and her sister, Martha, have buried the lonely men whom they’ve killed off with poisoned elderberry wine; a cast of a dozen actors
, representing the corpses, would come out to take a bow. There among the dead men that night, to the audible delight of the sold-out audience, was Newman, wearing a Yale sweatshirt and a red baseball cap: his first appearance in a play in more than thirty years, and he got an ovation without even delivering a line.

But he was still looking for good films to make and, especially, good people to make them with. In 1997, having forsworn living in California ever again, he changed agents, leaving CAA (which Mike Ovitz had himself done two years earlier) and signing with Sam Cohn of International Creative Management’s New York office. Ironically, when the deal was announced, Newman had just returned from making a film in Los Angeles, his first since
Nobody’s Fool
and a reunion with Robert Benton, who again directed and cowrote with Richard Russo.

The picture, originally entitled
Magic Hour
but renamed
Twilight
, concerned an ex-cop working as a gofer and a fixer for a pair of movie stars (played by Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman). There was a blackmail plot, a couple of dead bodies, and assorted nasty business. In some senses, it felt like a third Lew Harper film, with the old wisecracker and shit-stirrer, named Harry Ross here, reduced to living over his friends’ garage and running their errands, some of which rose to the level of carrying a gun around. Benton and Russo had written it specifically for Newman, and they made some pointed decisions. “We felt we needed him to be slightly older than he was in
Nobody’s Fool,”
Benton said. “I don’t know that it was entirely conscious, but we definitely wrote it for the man we had come to know, and we dressed him to look a little older.” A supporting cast that included James Garner, Stockard Channing, Liev Schreiber, John Spencer, and Reese Witherspoon made it seem like an ensemble film when, truly, it was almost entirely Newman’s.