..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Newman
by Jack Mathews

Among the stories published in recent months about the declining health of Paul Newman was one reporting that he had quietly transferred his $120 million share in Newman’s Own Foundation to a charity. That news took my mind away from the published photos of a gaunt Newman taken at an event at Martha Stewart’s home and back to a moment in the mid-1980s when the health-conscious actor was cooking up a batch of popcorn in a friend’s kitchen near Brainerd, Minnesota where he was to compete in an amateur auto race.

As he rolled the pot of corn kernels over the flame, he was explaining his technique for making healthy popcorn to me and it was very serious business. I don’t remember his precise instructions but I do remember his producing a fine kettle of corn. And when Newman’s Own salad dressing began showing up on supermarket shelves soon after, followed by Newman’s Own pasta sauce, salsa and other products, including popcorn, I knew that his food business wasn’t a case of a movie star exploiting fame for personal wealth. He was a true believer in eating healthy, even when eating junk.

Yes, as rumored, he drank a lot of beer; I’m surprised he didn’t come up with a low-cal Newman’s Brew. But he ran three miles every morning and never had an ounce of fat on his body. When I first met him, at another auto race track in Upstate New York in 1977, he was fighting to keep his weight above 150 pounds and told me he’d never weighed more than 160. Made sense; Rocky Graziano, who he played in Somebody Up There Likes Me, was a middle-weight, too.

In those years when I was around him, Newman did very few interviews. But he’d allowed me – first as a feature writer for the Detroit Free Press, then as a movie columnist for the Los Angeles Times – into his racing circle because of my own background in the sport (I’d been an executive at a southern California race track) and my friendship with Bob Thomas, an ex-newsman who handled PR for Newman’s Nissan car owner Bob Sharp.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of movie people during my journalism career, but rarely was I given the inside look that I got on those two racing weekends with Newman. Notoriously shy of the public, Newman spent most of his days either on the race track or in his motor home, which had an open door policy for fellow racers but had a roped-off perimeter to keep fans at a distance outside.

One of the fellow amateur racers who dropped in at his motor home at Watkins Glen in New York was Werner Erhard, the founder of the fad behavioral training program known as est. The only person I’d known who’d gone through est had become such an obnoxious evangelist for it that he drove away all of his former friends, including me.

But the brief meeting between Newman and Erhard, which consisted of each man telling the other how great he was, Newman explained that he and his wife Joanne Woodward had been through the program and that it had been a life-changing experience for both of them. He said it had given clarity to their lives. I remain skeptical, but whatever works.

Between the racing weekends in New York and Minnesota, I spent time with Newman on the set of Fort Apache, the Bronx. I’d read about an ongoing feud between him and one of the New York tabloids and called from Los Angeles to see if he’d entertain a visit from an out-of-town reporter. He said he would and I flew in to spend a day talking about his love-hate relationship with the media.

Newman, like most stars, disliked the superficiality of publicity and hated celebrity gossip.

But he was a bright, politically motivated, well-read progressive who understood the importance of the media to the political process and he felt betrayed by the reporters obsessing over such trivia as his actual height.

His studio biographies listed him at an even six-feet. The reporters picking on him were right; he was closer to 5’-10”. But what’s a couple inches between the screen and the audience?

I next saw him at Brainerd, where I shared a condo with him, Bob Thomas and Bob Sharp. Though the story I was doing was about his very serious racing career – for a guy who started racing at 48, he was something of a phenom on the Sports Car Club of America circuit – we spent a lot of time talking about movies.

He had brought a stack of scripts with him to read and, in his motor home during a break between practice runs, he was in the middle of one called Baja Oklahoma that he said was the best he’d seen in months. But he knew he couldn’t do the movie, he said, because it dealt with recreational drugs and that had been a non-starter for him since the 1978 death of his son Scott from a drug overdose.

Though Newman was on a bit of roll, having received recent Oscar nominations for Absence of Malice (1981) and The Verdict (1982), his last movie – Harry & Son (1984) – had not done well and he said he was nearly despondent over the quality of scripts he’d been offered.
Later that night, after the four of us had had dinner in the condo and Newman had retired to his room to read, he came back to the dining room wearing only boxer shorts and a pair of reading glasses that were resting on the tip of his nose. He was holding a script in his hand which he waved at me and “I think I’ve found one.”

I said “Really?”

“Yeah, 64 pages and no mistakes yet.”

As he turned to walk back to his room, I said “What’s it called?”

“The Color of Money, he said.

- Jack Mathews
September 27, 2008


Jack Mathews is a highly respect veteran film journalist and critic who has stained his fingers with ink at the Detroit Free Press, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Daily News. He is also the autrhor of The Battle of Brazil.

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