Paul Newman (39 page)

H
IS NEWFOUND
mettle would soon be tested in a surprising arena. In 1980 Newman had jumped from the Democratic ship and supported John Anderson for the presidency, and he was appalled when Ronald Reagan swept his way into the White House. On election night, with Reagan’s victory assured, the Newmans held a party at which they screened Reagan’s infamous comedy
Bedtime for Bonzo;
they and their well-lubricated friends banged spoons on pots and pans to drown out Reagan’s dialogue until the reality of the situation dampened their giddy mood and they turned the film off.

In response to Reagan’s Cold War fervor, Newman became a founder of the Center for Defense Information, a lobbying group that sought to counter the public statements of the Pentagon and the Reagan
administration with what the CDI regarded as a full and true picture of the Cold War arms race that Reagan was ratcheting up. In 1982 advocates of a freeze on the development of nuclear weapons and stockpiles managed to get a proposition on the California state ballot that urged both American and Soviet authorities to cease nuclear escalation and development. Newman was especially visible in the campaign, and he became an easy target for Reagan’s allies.

The trouble began when Newman declared, “The Russians have honored their obligations [to limit nuclear development] as well as we have.” That statement drew fire from a group named Californians for a Strong America, which had been formed to oppose the ballot initiative, and more unusually from Charlton Heston, who held a press conference on the tennis court of his Beverly Hills home to declare, “Paul is a good man and a good actor, but if he is going to speak out, he has a responsibility to check the facts first.”

Over the next few weeks a pattern emerged: Newman would appear on some TV or radio show to discuss his support of the nuclear freeze, and Heston would pop up the following day and dismiss whatever Newman had said. “Heston is riding piggyback on me, really sabotaging us,” Newman complained to Los Angeles radio host Michael Jackson. “He’s refuting my points, but I’m not getting any rebuttal.” He finally got something like a chance to actually talk to Heston when the latter was a guest on the late-night ABC news show
The Last Word;
via phone, Newman put questions to Heston in the studio. The exchange was brief but intriguing, and when Newman suggested that the two appear together on
The Last Word
and have a proper debate on the issue, it was agreed and scheduled for the week before Election Day.

On the day of the debate Newman spent hours boning up on the issues, taking time to meet with experts from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and composing notes and introductory comments for himself. (Habitually, he read from notes when he discussed political matters.) But throughout the broadcast Heston ran circles around him. Newman alternated between stolid repetition of data and unscripted reactions and even out-bursts; at one point he rudely dismissed a caller who had been selected to interject a question. Heston came off as a cool customer, referring to his opponent by his first name, calmly
provoking Newman with selective points of information, and finally comparing the advocates of a nuclear freeze to the Europeans who appeased Hitler in the 1930s. By most accounts, he walked away with the evening. Newman tried to brush it off. “I’ve done better and I’ve done worse,” he said. But the following year he insisted that the Scott Newman Foundation rescind its invitation to Heston to appear on the dais to introduce him at a benefit.

Throughout the decade, though, he continued to speak out against nuclear proliferation and the Reagan administration’s arms policies in general. He had letters and op-ed pieces published in the
New York Times.
He appeared at benefits for Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. He narrated a TV documentary about the presumed consequences of a limited nuclear war. And he continued to work on a long-gestating film project about the dangers of nuclear weapons. “I’ve been trying for ten years to write a film on this subject,” he told a reporter. “The only thing is, if you write a bad melodrama, who cares; if you write a bad comedy, who cares; but if you write a film about an important subject, it has to be absolutely impeccable. If it isn’t, it’s simply food for the enemy. He uses it against you.” And he certainly wasn’t going to let that happen again.

I
N THE
summer of 1982 he experienced a sad milestone: Theresa Newman died of metastatic lung cancer after an illness of approximately eighteen months.

She had stayed on at Brighton Road in Shaker Heights for decades, keeping the big house by herself and putting in time as a volunteer at a nearby nursing home, still hale. In 1980 she parted with her household belongings in an estate sale and moved to the desert region of Southern California, near Art Jr.’s home in Lake Arrowhead. After her death her sons brought her remains back to Cleveland, where she was buried in the mausoleum at the Mayfield Jewish Cemetery beside her husband.

Some of the mysteries about her early life were buried with her. Her death certificate said she was eighty-eight, and an obituary in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
gave her age as eighty-three—but neither, according to her own sister’s suspicions, may have been the case. The
newspaper also claimed that her maiden name was Fetzer—while at the same time identifying her surviving siblings as Andrew and Jewel Fetsko, perpetuating that family’s shadowy history.

Newman spoke about her very little, in comparison to what he shared with interviewers about his father. But soon after her death he described her as “an absolutely gorgeous woman with a volcanic emotional makeup.” It was the kindest and most vivid phrase he ever used about her—he could have been talking about the traits he admired most in his own wife—and the nearest thing he would provide her as a eulogy or an epitaph.

I
N JULY
1956
SHOW BIZ COLUMNIST
S
IDNEY
S
KOLSKY WAS PROFIL
ing the star of
Somebody Up There Likes Me
and shared an amusing bit of information about Newman with his readers: “He is an enthusiastic chef. He is proud of his ‘Newman Celery Salad’ [chopped celery, oil, vinegar, seasonings]. Dining out, he is likely to prepare the salad himself.”

Decades later Joanne Woodward averred that her husband had always insisted on having his salad just as he liked it. She remembered a long-ago dinner they shared at Chasen’s, one of Hollywood’s most clubbish and exclusive restaurants, back when it was an open secret that they were an item: “It was one of our first stylish meals out. He took an already oiled salad to the men’s room, washed it clean, dried it with towels, and returned to the table to do things right, with oil cut by a dash of water.”

In fact, Newman always held an amateur craftsman’s pride in his way with a small but select number of foods: hamburgers, steaks, popcorn, and salad—and particularly salad dressing. In restaurants from Westport to Eleuthera to Beverly Hills to Manhattan to Paris to Hawaii he would stand beside his table mixing a salad dressing from scratch while chefs and waiters and goggle-eyed customers looked on. And he truly did take the trouble to wash improperly dressed salads clean and start from scratch when he had to.

At home, inevitably, his dressing was the house brand. And when his grown-up kids would come home to visit, he would often whip them up
a batch and send them off with a wine bottle full of the stuff. Like his endless showers, his daily saunas, the ice baths to which he submitted his face, his cases of beer, and his notoriously sloppy clothes, it was one of the homey touches about him that became the stuff of legend.

In December 1980 he had a nifty idea. The Newmans had a Yuletide tradition of going from house to house in their little section of Westport and singing Christmas carols, joined by A. E. Hotchner and his wife and anyone else who was moved to join the throng as they made their way. That Christmas Newman decided to regale his neighbors with bottles of his fabled salad dressing. He and Hotchner repaired to an unused barn on Newman’s property and—armed with gallons of olive oil and red wine vinegar, large containers of seasonings, and bowls of chopped garlic and onions—mixed up a huge batch of the stuff, more than enough to fill all the empty wine bottles Newman had on hand.

Indeed, there was enough left over that Newman suggested that they bottle the rest of it and sell it at gourmet shops around Westport to raise beer money. Hotchner knew just enough about the world to talk him out of the idea; glancing around the barn, he later recalled, he told Newman, “Look at this place! The bugs can’t even stay alive here! If somebody croaks from ingesting this stuff, you’ll be in court, with no liability insurance.”

Newman heeded the advice. But the idea of bottling and selling his salad dressing had taken hold. He convinced Hotchner to put up $20,000, which he would match, to see if they could get a little business off the ground. Throughout the next two years he kept after Hotchner to find out more about the bottling and selling of salad dressing. “He was off making films, and I was trying to write a book,” Hotchner remembered. “But when he makes a film, he’s in his trailer most of the time, waiting for lights to be set up and all that. So we were constantly on the phone. At first I didn’t think he was serious about trying to bottle his dressing, but the more he persisted, the more I realized that if I wanted to get him off my back, I’d better get the dressing in the bottle.”

They consulted with various grocers and manufacturers and discovered that what they wanted to sell—a fresh-made salad dressing with-out
preservatives or dehydrated ingredients at a reasonable price—wasn’t possible, at least not in the way the business was then run. You needed chemicals to ensure the shelf life of the product, they were told; ingredients like fresh onion and garlic would spoil over time; olive oil prices would drive the cost up too high; you needed at least $1 million to compete for shelf space against Kraft and Wishbone and other giants of the business; and so forth.

Even as they dickered with their advisers, they tinkered with a recipe for the dressing that could be produced in mass quantities; they arranged a tasting at Newman’s home organized by a Westport chef named Martha Stewart, who had catered several parties there. Newman’s dressing won the blind taste test and then won another at Stew Leonard’s Dairy, a locally owned grocery store. And they got some good news from a laboratory that they’d hired to run some tests: the combination of red wine vinegar, fresh-ground mustard seed, and olive oil in their recipe formed a kind of natural preservative. They would still have to use flaked and dehydrated onion and garlic, but they could sell the stuff without fear.

Now they needed a name, packaging, and a marketing plan. Newman and Hotchner had been dreaming of opening a restaurant in Westport to serve plain American food and calling the place Newman’s Own. Wisely, they backed out of the restaurant business (although Newman did fund a place in Hollywood called Hampton’s, conceived on a similar theme and owned principally by Ronald Buck, one of the investors in the Factory). But they liked the name, so they decided to use it. Their original plan to sell the dressing in wine bottles was nixed; the bottling facilities they looked at all required the more familiar salad dressing–size containers.

And as for the label, one of their associates put it simply: “If your dressing is really good, you’ve got a good shot at it, since you’ll sell the first bottle because your face is on the label.” Newman, who had never endorsed anything, not even the Rolex watch that he wore in
Winning
and that became known to collectors by his name, was appalled: “I couldn’t think of anything tackier than putting my name and reputation on a bottle of salad dressing.” But somewhere in him, buried under decades of denial, was the genius of Art and Joe Newman, and
he came to see the logic of it. So he let them draw a picture of him for the labels, and he wrote copy for them that made fun of himself and generally treated the whole thing as a gag. Probably they’d lose their money anyhow, right?

They rented a small suite of offices in Westport and furnished it with chairs and tables from Newman’s swimming pool—plus an old Ping-Pong table that served as a conference table. They called themselves Salad King (after a brief stint as Newhotch Company) and set the business up as a class S corporation, which tied their fiscal year to the calendar year. That didn’t matter much to them, as they had no plan to make any personal or corporate profits: before they sold the very first bottle of dressing, they had agreed to give every penny they ever made—if indeed there were any pennies—to charity.

In August 1982 they started selling the concoction at Stew Leonard’s for $1.19 a bottle—about a quarter more than the national brands went for; the big promotion was “Buy two bottles, get a head of lettuce free.” In the first three weeks, without a nickel’s worth of promotion, they sold ten thousand bottles. And suddenly calls were coming in to the bottler from national supermarket chains wanting to stock the dressing.

So they upped production and did a promotional launch for a national media audience. Newman and Joanne sang special lyrics to Gilbert and Sullivan songs at Hanratty’s, a bar and grill on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, before a befuddled but amused press. And they repaired to Westport to see what would happen.

What happened was that nationwide sales were as brisk as those at Stew Leonard’s. Supermarkets that would normally order a case of a specific bottled salad dressing per month were ordering three times as much of Newman’s Own. In the first six months they sold $502,000 worth of dressing, with a profit of $65,000, and they gave it all away, mostly to the Scott Newman Foundation.

But there was a hiccup in their early success. The stuff was popular, but it wasn’t exactly what Newman wanted to sell; in the opinion of Mimi Sheraton, a food critic for the
New York Times
, Newman’s Own suffered from an “unpleasantly oily feel” and “overpowering dehydrated onion and garlic flavors.” That observation hit Newman right where he felt it: his palate. He ordered that the recipe be rejigged, and
the bottlers were able to find a formula that allowed for real bits of garlic and onion to be put in the dressing. By all accounts, the new formula was better.

Inspired, Newman had another idea: a bottled spaghetti sauce, with chunks of tomato and mushroom instead of the pureed ingredients then found in most jarred brands. Again, he and Hotchner were told all the reasons it wouldn’t work; again, the simplicity, naturalness, and savor of the product put it over. Newman’s Own Industrial Strength All-Natural Venetian-Style Spaghetti Sauce hit the market in 1983. In 1984 a lifetime’s worth of popcorn scarfing culminated in the release of Newman’s Own Old Style Picture Show Popcorn, a blend based on Newman’s finicky rejection of dozens of kernel samples. “He wanted a better popcorn than Orville Redenbacher,” remembered the Ohio farmer whose kernels finally passed muster with him.

Each year the profits—and the charitable donations—rose: $397,000 in 1983; $2 million plus in 1984. In 1987 Newman’s Own broke the $5 million barrier for a single year—and the $15 million barrier in total contributions. By then a microwave popcorn and Newman’s Own Old Fashioned Roadside Virgin Lemonade—based on a family recipe of Joanne’s—were in the product mix. Then came more varieties of salad dressing and pasta sauce. It was an empire.

With each new product line, Newman, Hotchner, and Joanne would engage in another corny snake oil–type launch at an unlikely location—Central Park, a Manhattan chophouse, Ronald Buck’s Los Angeles burger joint. And with each passing Christmas season another remarkable collection of donations would be made. Newman gave money to Kenyon College, to Yale’s School of Drama, and to the Actors Studio; Hotchner supported his own alma mater, Washington University, and the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis. They funded major charities such as hospitals, clinics, and organizations that supported research and care for those suffering from various diseases and conditions. But they did a kind of homemade grassroots charity as well, such as buying a school bus for a rural school catering to the children of farmworkers in Indiantown, Florida, or buying a fridge for a school in New Mexico, prompting a letter that said, in part, “Now our chocolate milk won’t spoil.”

Newman was dazzled by what was happening: “We have no plan,” he told a reporter. “We never have had a plan. Hotch and I comprise two of the great witless people in business—none of this is supposed to work, you understand. We are a testament to the theory of Random—whatever that means!” Major corporations approached them with offers to buy them out for millions, tens of millions. “We won’t meet with them,” Hotchner said. “It’s more fun to have a couple of bumbling idiots running the company.”

In the most amazing of ways, a wild hare of an idea had brought Newman full circle in his life. The young man who had become an actor to flee the sporting goods business suddenly saw the point of what his father had spent his too-brief lifetime doing. “I begin to understand the romance of business,” he said, “the allure of being the biggest fish in the pond and the juice you get from beating out your competitors.”

And along with being named to Richard Nixon’s list of enemies, he had a new feather in his cap to brag about. The success of Newman’s pasta sauce led Frank Sinatra, of all people, to come up with a signature sauce of his own, Artanis (
Sinatra
backward). It came and went from the marketplace in barely eighteen months. Henceforth Newman’s publicity bio would include the boast “He ran Frank Sinatra out of the spaghetti sauce business.”

He was having the time of his life.

A
ND HE
was a titan of more than just dressings and sauces and snacks.

In 1981 Newman reconnected with the Actors Studio, sitting in on a few workshops at West Forty-fourth Street, just for a shot of artistic refreshment, as it were. That little visit would turn into something more the following February, when Lee Strasberg died suddenly of a heart attack at age eighty. The tenacious old lion of acting teachers had enjoyed a remarkable final decade or so: he revived his acting career with his role as gangster Hyman Roth in
The Godfather: Part II;
he had two sons by a pretty young third wife; he was acting and teaching and fêted and honored and out and about almost until the day he died.

But the Actors Studio he left behind wasn’t the place that had turned Newman from an Ohio boy with a yen for the stage into a
cultivated Method actor with the ability to talk about his craft. Once the Actors Studio West had formed, actors who took their art seriously enough to keep studying it even as they enjoyed some success had one less reason to live in New York, where stage opportunities were increasingly rare. A lot of the original crew—Newman’s class and those just before and after—had evolved into supportive but usually absent alumni. Too, Strasberg was never especially fortunate as a businessman and hadn’t managed the finances of the operation well. The Actors Studio still had enormous cachet and respect and quality, but it had become a skeleton of itself.