My daughter, who’s away at college in New York called first thing in the morning with the question, “Did you hear the news?”
“What news? I just got up,” I answered.
“Paul Newman has died. You know what that means?”
Yes, I did. The last on my list of fantasy second husbands was gone. Like me, although thirty years apart, she first fell for him after watching “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The casting of him in the part of Brick, a former college athlete who tortured his wife, the gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor’s character Maggie, by withholding affection of any kind because he may have had a thing for his best friend, was drama at it’s highest and most seductive. The films subject matter had to be toned down from the Tennessee Williams play but it was still sensational. It came out in 1958, the year my parents married, the same as he and his wife, Joanne Woodward.
There were plenty of good performances after that and he stayed just as handsome. Then all of a sudden he started aging. Unbelievably, the fresh lines on his face made him even more beautiful. In movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Absence Of Malice, and The Verdict, he didn’t look like anyone else’s father or grandfather. He made aging look good. And it wasn’t just his looks. It was his philanthropy.
I’ll never forget the time I brought a bottle of his salad dressing when it first came out. A man at the checkout said to me, “You’re just buying that because Paul Newman is on the label.”
“No,” I informed him. “All his profits go to charity.”
“Really?” the man asked. I could tell he wanted to get out of line and buy a bottle himself. Many people did. Proceeds from Paul Newman’s food business, through his Newman’s Own Foundation have benefited charities around the world, a total of which now exceeds $200 million.
On his sex symbol status and the longevity of his marriage, he was quoted as saying, “Why fool around with hamburger when you have steak at home?” How sexy is that? It’s no wonder his business thrived.
By all accounts Paul Newman was a gentleman in the true sense of the word. I wrote a haiku poem for him years ago that I never got around to sending. It goes like this:
Unlike careless Hud.
He’s shown it’s one’s character
That makes a real stud.
