He's going to be absolutely, positively lionized for the next few weeks, and rightfully so. But I still want to write about Paul Newman. I liked Paul Newman. I respected Paul Newman. He was an honest-to-God hero, although he'd deny it and hate it if someone said it about him. What really saddens me is that his death is just another piece of a past world that has gone and probably won't be back.
I'm not a head-in-the-sand person that thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that things were 100% better when I was younger. But I don't think humanity is on a steady upward climb either. We go up and down in intelligence, decency, and kindness. And what we want or expect out of people in the limelight is one of the things that has gone down in recent decades. There have always been a celebrities of all types (artistic, political, miscellaneous) that have been peckerheads. This is not a modern occurrence. But the self-congratulatory aspect of celebrity has been magnified by increased media scrutiny. People who wouldn't have fallen prey to ego-driven conceit and selfishness fifty years ago can justify that type of negative change in their personality and self in the modern world. It's hard to keep perspective when someone is putting your face and/or voice on the airwaves, and other people respond to it. A lot of people start to think that means they're better than they are. I probably would do the same thing.
Paul Newman never did. This is a man who, without patting himself on the back too much, donated over $200 million to charity, set up camps all of the country for severely ill children, and championed civil rights a long time before it was cool (or, in Hollywood, popular or smart) to do so. But he didn't do those things for any other reason than to simply do them. His activism never intruded on his career or was part of his celebrity. You didn't hear about Paul Newman giving a quarter of a million dollars for refugees in Kosovo, or that his camps for camps for seriously ill children had expanded onto other countries and continents, or that he gave $10 million to his alma mater for a scholarship fund. You didn't hear about it because he didn't tell people and didn't advertise his philanthropy. He just did good things.
Paul Newman was a guy--but, somehow, he remained a regular guy. How he did this is beyond me. He was handsome when he was 20...and 30...and 40...and pretty much every decade after that. He drove race cars and was really good at it; he was a winning member of the 24 hours of Daytona when he was 70, and was still racing (and doing well) at 80. I have a good friend who is very involved in auto racing; he does film work for the Speed channel. "Oh, yeah," he told me once. "I've seen Paul Newman. Seen him lots of times." He paused. "He's a regular guy." Another pause. "His racing team always has great food." He made a hockey movie--the hockey movie--in Slap Shot. When he turned 70, he commented that drinking beer before noon was tougher. He served in the Navy World War II; he was as a tail gunner in the Pacific. He'd show up occasionally on Letterman and make Dave giggle. He married a famous actress and, like a lot of people--but unlike a lot of celebrities--it took. Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman celebrated their 50th anniversary earlier this year. That makes me happy.
A regular guy. Like I said, we live in a world where celebrities are almost universally convinced they are better and more important than they really are. Paul Newman didn't think he was better than he anyone else. But the truth is, he was. He did so much to help people all over the world; literally hundreds of thousands of adults and children owe him for his generosity, for his efforts to do good, for his decency. Paul Newman was a great actor--nine Academy Award nominations, one win, a slew of characters that have become cinematic and cultural icons. He was an even better human being. He'll be missed.
