Authors: Shawn Levy
The
Post
, which had taken up the policy of reporting on Newman only in a negative light since the
Fort Apache
imbroglio and his subsequent out-bursts during the
Absence of Malice
publicity tour, flat out called Dowd a liar. “Anyone who has met Paul face-to-face,” wrote “Page Six” columnist Richard Johnson, “says he has never hit 5′-11 except in heels.” As proof of its certainty, the
Post
offered to pay $1,000 to charity for every inch that Newman was above five foot eight in bare feet.
Newman, who was truly closer to five-ten at that age, hit the ceiling. He made arrangements to appear on television with
New York Daily News
columnist Liz Smith to debunk the
Post
’s claims and challenge them to an even more impressive wager. If he was five-eight, he said, he’d write a check to the paper for $500,000. After all, he said, a couple thousand was pocket money. “For a newspaper that loses $10 million a year,” he explained, “it strikes me that losing 1,000 bucks on a bet is irrelevant.” Instead, he said, if he was correct about his height, the
Post
should put up $100,000 for every inch he measured above five-eight. “These guys threw down the gauntlet,” he explained, “but it has the moral force of a powder puff. Real men don’t eat quiche, and real men don’t bet only $1,000.”
The back-and-forth went on for a couple of days. The
Post
made a show of looking for corroboration of Johnson’s claims and consulting gambling experts on whether they were being set up for a hustle. Newman, in private, made calls to an orthopedist to find out how to make himself as tall as he possibly could if he actually had to have himself measured. (It was recommended that he have it done early in the morning and that he hang from gravity boots the night before being measured and again immediately prior.) The
Post
shilly-shallied and finally dropped the matter, and Newman got the last word, firing off an angry letter (shared with the
Daily News
) that said, among other things, “Finding truth in the
New York Post
has been as difficult as finding
a good hamburger in Albania…Sorry you guys turned chicken when it got to the Big Time …I’m sorry I got sucked into operating on the same level that you guys do but give you points on winning that one. Never again.”
The episode absolutely cemented Newman as persona non grata in the pages of the
Post.
According to Susan Mulcahy, who worked on “Page Six,” he was on the paper’s “shit list” for years; she was forbidden even from mentioning Newman’s Own products and charitable donations. “For a time,” she remembered, “his name was stricken from the
Post
’s TV guide. If a Paul Newman movie had been scheduled for television broadcast, the
Post
would describe it without mentioning Newman:
Hud
starring Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas, or
The Hustler
starring Jackie Gleason.”
Newman held on to his portion of the grudge for years as well. Speaking of
Post
owner Rupert Murdoch nearly a decade later, he railed, “I may be dead wrong. He may be the most charitable person in Australia. He might have a whole hospital complex somewhere. He may have built sixty-three Presbyterian churches. But I think he’s a real bloodsucker. He’ll take and squeeze and take anything he can get and never give anything back.” He added, in fact, that he refused to work for 20th Century–Fox, which Murdoch owned: “Not,” he confessed, “that anyone gives a shit.” (And he never did.)
*
J
UST A
few months after this distasteful dustup, Newman found himself getting his hands dirty once again—but for a far more uplifting reason. Charity had become more and more natural for him. “I don’t think there’s anything odd about philanthropy,” he told people. “It’s
the other stance that confounds me.” That fall he had awakened with a vision for a new charitable venture, one that would be a way, he later said, of sharing his lifetime of personal good fortune.
Specifically, as he revealed to Joanne and to his Newman’s Own partner, A. E. Hotchner, he had it in mind to build a camp for children suffering from cancer: a place that felt like the Wild West of childhood fantasy, with fishing and swimming and animals and rowdy play and no visible reminders of the daily grinds of hospitals and doctors’ offices to which those unfortunate kids were subject the rest of the year. Campers would be afforded the very best health care, he conceived, and their families wouldn’t be charged a cent for the privilege of having a child attend.
Hotchner was immediately on board with the idea, and the two men set about a series of tasks: finding a campsite, finding funding (tax regulations required every dollar donated from Newman’s Own to be matched from other sources), finding physicians to staff the camp, and finding somebody to build the place to Newman’s quirky specifications. After one costly false start, the first item on their to-do list was satisfied when they discovered a nearly three-hundred-acre lot in the northeast corner of Connecticut, straddling the towns of Ashford and Eastford. It was relatively flat—a boon, considering that many potential campers would be in wheelchairs—and included a forty-seven-acre lake. They bought it, and in December 1986 they broke ground on the site.
Seeking designers to build the camp and doctors to staff and equip it, they turned to Yale and came away with both. Dr. Howard A. Pearson, chairman of pediatric service at Yale–New Haven Hospital, assembled an advisory board of pediatric hematologists and oncologists. And Thomas H. Beeby, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, agreed to oversee the plans for the camp personally, even when his invaluable input was scotched by Newman in favor of some specific and idiosyncratic idea that he had for the place.
While plans for construction and the medical program were developing, Newman and Hotchner sought funding from various entities with which Newman and/or Newman’s Own had relationships, and they were received with open arms and checkbooks. Anheuser Busch
donated $1 million for construction of the central building in the camp. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers volunteered its services in dredging and shoring up the lake; the U.S. Navy Seabees built bridges and piers. An organization of Connecticut swimming-pool manufacturers dropped professional rivalries to donate the time, labor, and materials to build an Olympic-size pool. It was impressive and gratifying, but it was still short of equaling the $7 million that Newman’s Own was donating to build the camp and endow its operation.
That hurdle was overcome in October 1987, when Newman was introduced to Khaled Alhegelan, the twenty-five-year-old son of a Saudi Arabian diplomat. Alhegelan had grown up with thalassemia, a form of anemia that had severely limited his activities as a boy, and after meeting with Newman and learning about the camp’s intentions and needs, he took advantage of a law that permitted ordinary Saudis to petition their king for assistance in personal matters. A few days later he phoned Westport and told Newman and Hotchner that if they would come to the Saudi embassy in Washington, he would present them with a gift from King Fahd. The little makeshift delegation from Connecticut made the trip and were stunned when the Saudi ambassador handed them a check for $5 million. It allowed them to begin construction right away.
In June 1988 the Hole in the Wall Camp, named for the group of bandits led by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, welcomed its first class of campers. The facility that they encountered resembled, in Newman’s words, “a turn-of-the-century lumber camp in Oregon.” There was a town center, complete with buildings that looked like Old West saloons and general stores. There were small, unmatched cabins scattered in adjacent fields. There were delicately inclined paths and doorways wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs, electric scooters, and gurneys. At Newman’s insistence, nothing about the place resembled a medical facility. “These kids spend too much time in hospitals already,” he said. Even the infirmary, staffed by highly skilled volunteers and filled with the most up-to-date equipment, was hidden behind rough wooden walls and marked by signs as the O.K. Corral.
That first summer provided something of a dry run, with only half of the available spaces for campers actually being used. But before long
word got out about the level of care the camp provided—and of the miraculous elation it afforded the campers. The original plan of two sessions per summer was expanded, as was the range of illnesses that made a child eligible to attend. Raising money to maintain the camp’s operating funds became a simple matter of asking—or of hosting an annual celebrity-filled gala revue in which the likes of Newman, Joanne, Julia Roberts, Robin Williams, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Glenn Close, Jason Robards, Nathan Lane, Gregory Hines, Rosemary Clooney, Jerry Seinfeld, Bobby Short, Tony Randall, and dozens of other high-wattage names cavorted in fractured fairy tales and over-the-top pantomimes on stages in New York, Los Angeles, and Connecticut. In one of the most memorable benefits, Newman and Hotchner revived their first project together—the Hemingway adaptations for TV and the big screen—as
The World of Nick Adams
, a star-studded evening of celebrity readings (Newman, Joanne, Julia Roberts, Morgan Freeman, Meryl Streep, Matt Damon, and more) accompanied by the performance of a score that Aaron Copland had written for the script decades earlier; Carnegie Hall was sold out at $2,500 a seat and up.
In 1993 a sister camp, the Double H Hole in the Woods Ranch, opened in Lake Luzerne, New York. The following year another facility, the Boggy Creek Gang Camp, sprouted up in Lake County, Florida. Other camps followed in Ireland, France, Israel, California, and North Carolina, and at a rotating series of sites in Africa. In the first two decades of their existence, the various associated Hole in the Wall Camps, eleven in all, served nearly 120,000 children from thirty-one U.S. states and twenty-eight countries, including the Soviet Union, from which eight children stricken ill by the Chernobyl nuclear accident made the trip to Ashford.
For Newman, the camps were the summation of his life’s work: the sweetest fruit from the tree of charity that had grown from the seed of his acting career—the reason, he might even have allowed, that he had been born with those eyes, that metabolism, that terrier determination, and that deep reservoir of luck. And his luck included the good fortune not only to live to see the camps thrive but to be able to visit them and interact with the children: fishing, teaching them practical jokes, singing campfire songs, playing badminton, telling tale tales. He
could be counted on to make at least one visit to Ashford during each camp session, usually unannounced. He ate with the campers, delighted in their ribbing, marveled at their resilience. He could overwhelm himself by relating stories such as that of the girl who told him, “Coming up here is what I live for—what I stay alive for during those miserable eleven months and two weeks is to come up here for the summer.”
As Colneth Smiley Jr., a Hole in the Wall camper, later recalled, “That camp was friggin’ awesome. It was even better than some family vacations, because I got to get away from worried relatives who constantly reminded me that I shouldn’t do this or shouldn’t do that. At Paul Newman’s camp, a kid—as sick as he or she was—was allowed to be a kid.” There were hundreds, thousands, of similar testimonials.
“If I’m going to leave a legacy,” Newman would say, “it’s not going to be my films or anything I do politically. It’s going to be these camps.” And like so many philanthropists, he felt that it was he who benefited from his work and generosity and not the people he was helping. He cherished his encounters. John Considine recalled that after one of the first camp sessions Newman wore continuously a bracelet made for him by a little girl who didn’t have very long to live after her visit to Ashford. “Even if he was in a tuxedo he had it on,” he said. But Newman reveled too in how unimpressed the campers were to meet him: “Two of the kids came over, pulled at my pant leg, and said, ‘You a movie star?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve done some films.’ They said, ‘Did you do
Cool Hand Luke
?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I did
Cool Hand Luke.’
They said, ‘Boy, them movies sure make you look young!’”
I
N THE
winter of 1986, as
The Color of Money
was making its way into theaters, Newman was on a soundstage in Astoria, Queens, involved in yet another directorial project based on yet another play. This time it was
The Glass Menagerie
, Tennessee Williams’s heartbreaking semiautobiographical tale of an itchy young man, his physically and emotionally hobbled sister, their overbearing, self-absorbed mother, and a gentleman caller who visits them for dinner one fateful evening. For this small and emotionally charged story, Newman had most of the
cast of a production that had recently been staged in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and later in New Haven, Connecticut: Joanne as the suffocating mother, Amanda Wingfield; Karen Allen as her daughter, Laura; and James Naughton as the man whom Amanda hoped would rescue Laura from a sentence of spinsterhood. The actors who had played Tom Wingfield onstage—John Sayles in Williamstown and Treat Williams in New Haven—were unavailable. But while he was working in Chicago on
The Color of Money
, Newman heard tell of the well-regarded Steppenwolf Theater production of the play from a few years earlier, in which John Malkovich played the role. He called the actor, who was working in Florida, to discuss it.
As Malkovich recalled, “I said, ‘Here’s the thing: I have some really specific ideas about this which are based on a fairly intense study of it. So I kind of more or less know how I want to do it. So maybe we should meet, and if you talk me out of that, great, or if you think that the way I see it is not your way, then you shouldn’t use me.’ And he said, ‘That sounds fair.’ So he came down to Miami, and we had lunch at a club where Hedy Lamarr lived, and we had a good chat. Although I do remember him dropping the sunglasses at one point when I said the only ‘seamen’ Tom was interested in was not the kind you find in a club for sailors.” Newman overlooked the blue remark and hired Malkovich for the role.