[Dialogue] Emailing: Op-Ed Columnist - Cool Hand Paul - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.htm

Harry Wainwright h-wainwright at charter.net
Wed Oct 1 13:44:05 EDT 2008 

 <http://www.nytimes.com/> The New York Times 

 
<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/adx/images/ADS/18/17/ad.181778/choke_88x31_thi
sfriday.gif>
<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&page=www.nytimes.co
m/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=d715c5b3/9b7b01ff
&camp=foxsearch2008_emailtools_810908e_nyt5&ad=choke_nowplaying&goto=http://
www.foxsearchlight.com/choke/> Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By


  _____  

October 1, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

Cool Hand Paul 

By MAUREEN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/mau
reendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per> DOWD

Paul Newman taught me how to peel a cucumber.

My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the
intricacies of making a salad. So when the man who has made $250 million for
charity with Newman's Own dressings and sauces asked me to help him make a
salad in 1986, while I was writing a profile of him for The Times Magazine,
I mangled my cucumber so thoroughly that he snatched it away and showed me
how to do it. 

At a moment when America feels angry and betrayed, when our leaders have
forfeited our trust and jeopardized our future, we lost an American icon who
stood for traits that have been in short supply in the Bush administration:
shrewdness, humility, decency, generosity, class.

When I asked W. in 1999 if he identified with any literary heroes, he said
no, but he was drawn to Paul Newman's defiance in "Cool Hand Luke."

The Texan cast himself as an anti-hero and rebel. But as president, he knew
how to strut only in photo-ops, not when actual calamities loomed or hit.

Newman was a rare liberal who loved the label; he made it onto Nixon's
enemies list for supporting Eugene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam run. In 1997, I
called him when he began writing a bit for The Nation (where he was an
investor). He ranted about right-wingers "popping out of rat holes" but also
faulted the Clintons.

"Everything is about what's winnable, not about the morality of the issues,"
he told me. In politics, as in racing cars, he said: "You can do anything if
you are prepared to deal with the consequences."

I was nervous the first time I met the star, because he'd been a teenage
crush - along with William F. Buckley Jr. (I loved Buckley's sesquipedalian
dexterity - a lost art in the anti-intellectual conservative set of W. and
Sarah Palin.)

We met at a restaurant on the Upper East Side, where he proceeded to
interview me.

Newman: "What do you know about nuclear disarmament?"

Dowd: "Ummm."

Newman: "How can you justify The Times's editorial position on the
moratorium?"

Dowd: "Ummm."

He was deeply uncomfortable at getting adulation for playacting,
acknowledging that "there's something very corrupting about being an actor.
It places a terrible premium on appearance."

With a Butch Cassidy grin, he told me that he pictured his epitaph being:
"Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown."

He did not want to talk about his movies; he wanted to talk throw-weights.
He liked Bach and Budweiser and playing goofy practical jokes. (Once, when
we were driving, he began high-speed bumping the car in front of us, driven
by his friend.) He was bored by fashion and embarrassed by women who
brazenly flirted with him or asked him to take off his sunglasses to show
his blue eyes.

Once, when he was handing out punch at a Westport charity event, a dowager
asked him to stir her drink with his finger. 

"I'd be glad to," Newman replied, "but I just took it out of a cyanide
bottle."

He recalled how utterly flummoxed he was the time a stunning call girl
approached him on Fifth Avenue and offered to dispense with her fee.

"You want to send her off with something classy and stylish, the way Cary
Grant would, or Clint Eastwood," he said. "You think, how would Hombre
handle this? And when this woman came up to me - the guy who played Hud -
what comes through? Laurel and Hardy. Both of them." 

He said he was not like his sultry, flamboyant characters: "You don't always
have Tennessee Williams around to write glorious lines for you."

He and his wife were reputed to have one of the happiest marriages in
Hollywood, but the outspoken Joanne Woodward admitted that it took a lot of
therapy to cope with the fact that, even though she got an Oscar first, he
was able to stay a leading man for four decades. She told a magazine that
she was always "uncomfortable and even angry" that "Paul was so much bigger
than I was ... Because he was living my fantasy" to be a star.

She would not talk to me for The Times's profile that her husband did to
promote "The Color of Money" - even just on the topic of his role as the
director of five movies that she had starred in. She said she did interviews
only solo or jointly with him - not about him. That byzantine deal reflected
the rivalry that threaded through their romance.

He said that he appreciated her, as he looked around his elegant Fifth
Avenue apartment, observing dryly: "If anyone had ever told me 20 years ago
I'd be sitting in a room with peach walls, I would have told them to take a
nap in a urinal." 


Home <http://www.nytimes.com/>  

*	World <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html>  

*	U.S. <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.html>  

*	N.Y. /  <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/index.html> Region 

*	Business <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/index.html>  

*	Technology <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/technology/index.html>  

*	Science <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/index.html>  

*	Health <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/health/index.html>  

*	Sports <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/sports/index.html>  

*	Opinion <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html>  

*	Arts <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/arts/index.html>  

*	Style <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/style/index.html>  

*	Travel <http://travel.nytimes.com/pages/travel/index.html>  

*	Jobs <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/jobs/index.html>  

*	Real  <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/realestate/index.html> Estate 

*	Automobiles <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/automobiles/index.html>  

*	Back to Top <>  

Copyright  <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>
2008 The New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>  

*	Privacy Policy <http://www.nytimes.com/privacy>  

*	Search
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/sitesearch_selector.html?query=&date_select=fu
ll&type=nyt>  

*	Corrections <http://www.nytimes.com/corrections.html>  

*	RSS <http://www.nytimes.com/rss>  

*	First Look <http://firstlook.nytimes.com>  

*	Help <http://www.nytimes.com/membercenter/sitehelp.html>  

*	Contact
<http://nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/infoservdirectory.html> Us 

*	Work  <https://careers.nytco.com/TAM/nyt_docs/TAM/candidate.html>
for Us 

*	Site Map <http://spiderbites.nytimes.com/>  

 
<http://up.nytimes.com/?d=0/9/&t=&s=1&ui=3816349&r=&u=www%2enytimes%2ecom%2f
2008%2f10%2f01%2fopinion%2f01dowd%2ehtml%3f%5fr%3d1%26th%3d%26oref%3dslogin%
26emc%3dth%26pagewanted%3dprint> 
 DCSIMG
<http://wt.o.nytimes.com/dcsym57yw10000s1s8g0boozt_9t1x/njs.gif?dcsuri=/noja
vascript&WT.js=No&WT.tv=1.0.7> 
 
<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/clientside/5f9cd5c0Q2F(VqI0YH0IVQ2FQ20Ile7sq
I1VHQ2Fs> 
 
 
  _____  

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20081001/f4eb3794/attachment-0002.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1810 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20081001/f4eb3794/attachment-0003.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 489 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20081001/f4eb3794/attachment-0004.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 3219 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20081001/f4eb3794/attachment-0005.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 7 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20081001/f4eb3794/attachment-0001.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20081001/f4eb3794/attachment-0003.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: nojavascript&WT.js=No&WT.tv=1.0.ZIP
Type: application/x-zip-compressed
Size: 496 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20081001/f4eb3794/attachment-0001.ZIP>

More information about the Dialogue mailing list