Paul Newman (51 page)

In September 2004 he appeared in a clown getup—red nose, bowler hat, baggy suit, big yellow shoes—and entertained three hundred kids as a part of Zippo’s Circus, which was then performing under an old-fashioned traveling big top in London’s Highbury Fields. Presented incognito to the audience as Butch Bolognese, he set about pouring plates of pasta down the pants of the other clowns. Later, in the company of his brother, Art, who’d made the trip with him, he laughed off the whole thing, declaring, “I’m just grateful I didn’t get a pie in the face out there.”

He was back in the States in time for the presidential election and spent a day in Ohio ringing doorbells in support of John Kerry. He made a special trip to Shaker Heights and, inevitably, 2983 Brighton Road, where, his eyes now and again brimming with tears, he introduced himself to the current owners and wandered through the rooms, pointing out to the people who accompanied him, among other highlights, the nook in the basement where he and his brother had hidden their cigarette butts from their mom.
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Not long before that he had spent a fair bit of the summer in Maine, making a movie. He had secured another role as another rascal in another adaptation of a Richard Russo novel,
Empire Falls
, for which he served as a producer as well as scene-stealing rogue Max Roby, the larcenous and unkempt father of the novel’s beleaguered protagonist. As Russo recalled, Newman got his hands on the novel while it was still in galleys and phoned him excitedly about the prospect of adapting it not into a film but into a long-form project that would preserve its kaleidoscope of characters and scenes. “He was one
of the first people to call me after reading the book,” Russo said, “and he was very kind about it, and the last thing he said before he hung up was, ‘And you know: no one will be better as Max.’”

Russo drove from his Maine home to Westport to discuss the project with Newman and producer Marc Platt, and the plan was to have dinner together afterward. When they all stepped into the driveway, Newman’s eye was caught by Russo’s new Audi sedan, which was parked beyond the limousine that was waiting to take them to the restaurant. “Whose car is that?” Newman wondered aloud, and told it was Russo’s, he asked if he could drive it to the restaurant and have the limo follow.

“Well,” remembered Russo, “are you gonna tell Paul Newman he can’t drive your car? So I give him the keys, and he starts to pull out onto the street with the limo behind us, and suddenly he stomps on the pedal, and my head whips back, and we go ass-out into the road, and we’re gone. And he’s testing the steering, going left-right, left-right. And now we’re finally heading into Westport, and he slows down to about thirty-five, and he says, ‘I like your car. It’s a good car.’ And he looks into the mirror and says, ‘Where the hell are those guys?’”

The film shot in the summer of 2004 along the Maine coast with an impressive cast of stars—including Joanne, Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Estelle Parsons, Robin Wright Penn, Theresa Russell, and Aidan Quinn—under the direction of Fred Schepisi. When it aired in two parts the following spring, it received respectful but largely unenthusiastic reviews—comparisons to
Nobody’s Fool
generally didn’t favor it. But Newman, appearing in a mere handful of scenes, was universally lauded as a show-stealer. With a spotty beard (he never could get a truly robust one going, not really), tattered clothes, and a bony frame, he looked like the desiccated old uncle of Judge Roy Bean.

Newman, naturally, reveled in the role: “I’m playing this old goat who kidnaps a priest with Alzheimer’s, steals a car and the church’s money, leaves for the Florida Keys, and has no contact with anybody,” he told a reporter. “When he finally calls his son back home, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘Where’s my Social Security check?’ You get that character in one sentence.”

He had pride in the film, but only to a point. He received not one, not two, but
three
nominations for his acting—an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild Award—and once again, he failed to show up for any of the prize ceremonies, even though he was named the winner all three times.

T
HAT IMPRESSIVE
feat, though, paled in comparison to one he really relished. In 2003 the young French driver Sebastien Bourdais joined the Newman-Haas Champ Car team, which was then defending the title won the previous year by Cristiano da Matta. Bourdais, then only twenty-four years old, finished a respectable fourth place in the season’s rankings. But the next year he burst out to win the championship, a feat he repeated for the next three years to claim a four-peat, 2004–7, the most dominant string ever in American open-wheel racing. Newman could be counted on to attend several races each season, buzzing around the pits and the paddock on his red scooter, having a beer and a burger and a laugh, and often showing up on the podium to have his photo taken with the victorious Bourdais. His enjoyment of racing weekends had increased as his face had become less famous and his presence less a cause for disruption and embarrassment. When Bourdais won the 2006 San Jose Grand Prix, Newman couldn’t get past the security guards at the gate to the winner’s circle and had to stand by as a number of young women in skimpy attire were admitted; rescued by the race’s publicity director, he waved off an apology, nodding toward the girls and admitting, “They’re better looking.”

The smashing success of this team led Newman to invest in another, Newman-Wachs, part of Champ Car’s Atlantic Series, which was, in effect, a minor-league circuit for the development of young drivers. In 2007 Newman and Carl Haas took on another partner, businessman and longtime racing sponsor Mike Lanigan. Newman also lent his name to a group that tried to get a racetrack built at Floyd Bennett Field, alongside Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn, a project that was ultimately scuttled on environmental grounds. That same year Newman-Haas-Lanigan, as the team was newly christened, sought to expand into NASCAR for the first time by forging a partnership with
Robert Yates, a veteran of the stock-car circuit that had become America’s favorite form of racing in the years after the divisive split among open-wheel racers.

After lengthy negotiations that deal fell through, but stunning progress was made on another front: in early 2008 it was announced that the Champ Car series and the Indy Racing League had buried the hatchet and would reunite under the rubric of IndyCar. The Champ series would expire with that remarkable string of wins by Bourdais, who returned to Europe and Formula 1. And the path would be cleared for Newman to return to the Indy 500. As part of the reunification deal, he joined Roger Penske in penning an open letter asking fans of both series to reunite at the 500, and Tony George, his former nemesis, agreed to have the new league become a charitable partner of the Hole in the Wall Camps.

Even in the ultracompetitive world of auto racing, this was a true win-win. “When I heard about the reunification, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven,” Newman said. “It was absolutely necessary for both groups. It’s tragic that it didn’t happen sooner…It’s wonderful to be running against Roger Penske, Bobby Rahal, and Michael Andretti once again.”

When he talked about running against those other teams, he was exaggerating only slightly. He still raced a couple of times a year, even into his eighties. “I’d like to assume the role of elder statesman,” he said, “taking walks in the woods and going fishing, but here I am, forever strapping myself into these machines …And I will, with the blessing of my wife, continue until I embarrass myself.” He rarely did; rather, he continued to have amazing adventures behind the wheel. In 2005 he ran a few practice laps in the run-up to the 24 Hours of Daytona, having to flee his vehicle when it caught fire due to a faulty engine mechanism; he was unhurt. In 2006, visiting his Hole in the Wall affiliate camp in San Marcello Pistoiese, Italy, he stopped off in nearby Maranello to tour the Ferrari plant and try out the company’s new high-end 599 GTB Fiorano on the practice track. In 2007
—at age eighty-two—
he ran in an SCCA amateur race at Watkins Glen, New York, despite the fact that his coolant suit (a kind of vest employed by racers to keep body temperature down) stopped functioning on the
third lap; he needed a little oxygen afterward, but he needed no help on the track, finishing fourth. “I pulled alongside him, but he shut the door on me,” said the fifth-place driver, William Rozmajzl. “He’s a smart guy. He has a lot of experience.”

Some of that experience, as Richard Russo’s account would indicate, was earned off the racetrack. In 2003 Newman had acquired a car inspired by his Volkswagens with the Porsche engines in them. He had been driving V-6 Volvo station wagons and found a mechanic who was able to soup them up even further, sticking in Ford V-8 engines and turbo superchargers—“puffers”—that turned them into unassuming little suburban rocket ships. Newman knew that his Westport buddy David Letterman was fond of a fast car, and he offered him the chance to buy one while his own was being built. As Letterman remembered, Newman was all excited about the prospect: “This thing will turn about four hundred horsepower, so if you pop the clutch you’re gonna tear up the rear end. I tell ya, from twenty to a hundred you can chew anybody’s ass!” “And you know,” Letterman said, “I’m thinking to myself, what circumstance would Paul find himself in driving around in a Volvo station wagon where he feels like he’s gotta chew somebody’s ass? But when Paul Newman offers you a puffer, I mean, you take it. You don’t turn down Paul Newman.”

In a way this forty-year obsession with cars and speed and racing had become the perfect balance to the acting craft that had similarly beguiled him and turned him into a lifelong devotee. But where acting’s rewards were, in his view, spiritual, fleeting, and rare, racing’s were verifiable, demonstrable, and concrete. “I’m a very competitive person,” he said. “I always have been. And it’s hard to be competitive about something as amorphous as acting. But you can be competitive on the track, because their rules are very simple and the declaration of the winner is very concise.” As he put it another time, “It’s right to a thousandth of a second. Your bumper is here. That guy’s bumper is there. You win.”

N
ONETHELESS
, acting was still one of his true loves, and he was still searching for something he’d enjoy doing. He had long been looking
for a film he could do with Joanne, or maybe one that could serve as a suitable farewell to the screen. “There’s a lot of stuff floating around,” he said in 2005, “but I don’t like to talk about it until it’s in cement. I think I’d like to make one more film and then take a powder. It’s time Joanne and I spent quality time together.”

As it happened, it wasn’t Joanne but rather his grandsons, Pete and Henry, who were most likely to enjoy Pop-Pop’s new movie. For the first time since
Winning
he would be playing a racer on-screen and not on a track. This time, though, he would be playing not the driver but
the vehicle.
He would provide the voice for a character in
Cars
, a digitally animated feature set in a world where cars were alive and written and directed by John Lasseter, the maker of the
Toy Story
films and chief creative officer for Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation.

Lasseter had written a story about a cocky championship race car, Lightning McQueen, who found himself lost in the desert town of Radiator Springs, where he would learn some lessons about life, love, and racing from the locals, who included Doc Hudson, the town physician, judge, and—though nobody knew it—celebrity-in-hiding, the one-time racing champion of the world, Hudson Hornet. Newman’s character would have blue eyes, a hint of a southern accent, a surly temper, and no lady friend: another crusty rogue from the gallery of late-period Newman portraits.

In late 2004 Lasseter came to Newman with a full package of incentives to be in the movie: it was a quality project, offered a good salary for a job that didn’t require him to shave or wear wardrobe, and included a sponsorship deal between Disney and Newman-Haas in the upcoming 24 Hours of Daytona:
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and a donation of $500,000 would go to the Association of Hole in the Wall Camps. The director was smart enough to bait the hook not with money or talk about Pixar’s excellence but with the choice of car they had for his character: “It’s a ’51 Hudson Hornet,” Lasseter explained, “which most people don’t know about.
But those who do, know of its legendary nature. It was really way ahead of its time and dominated the stock car–style of racing back then and was the fastest production car of its day… Paul was very excited about that.” Newman leaped in, sticking around after his recording sessions to talk details of cars and racing with Lasseter, conveying his passion for the sport so ardently that, as Lasseter said, “I gave him a ‘racing consultant’ credit because his working with me was so valuable.”

For his part Newman delighted in being able to act without worrying about his appearance or any of the cumbersome machinery of live-action filmmaking. “The nice thing,” he said, “is you don’t even really have to account for yourself. All of the physical stuff that you work on as an actor you just throw away…You can have a line and you can say that it’s wrong and you can just jump on it and do it sixty different ways back-to-back…You can just keep improvising and improving on it or making it completely different or changing words. You just have a lot more freedom.”

The whole thing delighted him. In May 2006 he showed up with much of the rest of the cast of the film—Owen Wilson, Cheech Marin, Bonnie Hunt, and Pixar’s house good-luck charm, John Ratzenberger—at the Loews Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina, where a publicity event for the film coincided with a NASCAR race. It was a big media to-do, with press conferences, an outdoor screening of
Cars
, and, to Newman’s delight, a little bit of driving. Specifically, he had the chance to drive a Hudson Hornet chassis mounted on top of a racing-quality stock-car frame and engine. Other drivers got to run the car before he did, and as NASCAR champ Jimmie Johnson recalled, “The only man on pit road with a stopwatch was Paul Newman. He was timing the laps I was running, other guys were running. Then he got in that car, that had no business, with that body especially, going around that track at speed, and he was trying to break the lap times that we were running.”