John Binder: This may be unacceptably long but perhaps of some interest to some Kenyon publication. I own the material, excerpted from my self-published memoir,
Who Needs Heaven? (Amazon)
Memories of Paul NewmanI wrote a script -
North Dallas Forty - for Robert "Bob" Altman in 1975. Somebody else eventually made that film with my credit deleted, but Bob hired me as an assistant on the film he was about to shoot,
Buffalo Bill and The Indians starring
Paul Newman ’49.
One of my memorable tasks in the first few days of filming was to sit with Paul Newman and separately with Burt Lancaster, in the mornings when they were going over their parts, making decisions, shaping their characters. They needed someone to read with and be an audience for their inventions. I didn’t dare attempt to “act” whatever part I was reading, but just to speak the lines, so they could familiarize and experiment with theirs. I gave them feedback when they asked, “Is that strong enough?” Or, “Maybe I don’t need that line. I can just do a gesture? What do you think?” I was an audience of one.
Newman’s work on his lines was surprising. He didn’t act much. He would just sort of feel out his lines. He’d take them apart. He’d read or recite a few words, then fall silent and move his head a bit or look up and smile, maybe. He broke the lines into pieces. He’d mutter about what he might do here or there. He’d ask me to read a line again for him, so he could hear it. I was fascinated but I must confess, the first day we did this, after half an hour’s halting work, I thought to myself, “Can this guy act? Where’s Paul Newman? Where’s ‘Fast Eddie’ Felson, my favorite. Where’s Hud? Where’s Cool Hand Luke?” Of course, that was a silly thought. When he reassembled all those bits and pieces, pauses and "looks" at the camera, "Paul Newman" materialized.
Buffalo Bill was a casting stretch for Newman. The real Bill Cody was a blowhard, a paunchy goateed drinker, a nasty bastard who had earned his name trying hard to wipe out the North American buffalo so that Plains Indians would starve to death. Bill killed thousands of them personally. Playwright Arthur Kopit and Rudolph didn’t fill in the nasty part, but neither did Altman make Bill a hero. In one interview he gave on the set, he was asked why his movies never had a hero. He had a quick answer. “I don’t create heroes, because I don’t want to be responsible for them.” I still admire that statement. Paul Newman playing any version of Buffalo Bill was a stretch. Paul was just too much of a ‘cool hand’ to play an asshole like Buffalo Bill perfectly.
Being Paul Newman wasn’t a spoiled movie star. He was decent to everybody. When he was serious, he was completely serious. When someone showed up on set to interview him or talk other business, he was quite sober and charming. He would turn on “Paul Newman” like a light switch for those people. I was with him one day on a break when he was telling some of us a funny story. It was a little raunchy, too. He was acting it out and laughing. One of the A.D.s came and said, “Paul, there are some ladies here who would like to say hello”. We all looked and up walked half a dozen Catholic nuns in full habit. Paul took a beat, then summoned “Paul Newman” to turn and look at them handsomely. He said softly “Hello, girls.” They were charmed as any other “girls” might be. He took a few minutes to speak with them. If he had invited them for drinks that evening, I think they might have all showed up.
With the crew, he liked to drop the movie star burden and just “dick around”. That was one of his favorite expressions “dickin’ around”. We didn’t know where he got it, but he came on the set one day and tossed out that expression. He repeated it a lot thereafter. When Bob wanted to work, Paul would bark the order. “Come on guys. Quit dickin’ around.” He thought it was funny. He’d toss it at anybody on the set, and not just the men. Then he’d chuckle. We thought it was funny, too, for a while.
He liked having a beer, Coors, which he helped to make famous, telling corny jokes, trying to be just one of the guys. The movie star was nowhere to be found, just this playful, somewhat goofy sort of college boy character. (He and I attended the same college, by the way, Kenyon in Ohio. Our campus theatre, where I spent a lot of time in plays, was named after him.) At any rate, rowdy college guy persona was the antidote to the other charming, seductive, Paul Newman.
The playful guy also liked practical jokes. He bragged that once on the set of
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid or
The Sting, he opened the door of his on-set motor home and was inundated with a cascade of popcorn. Robert Redford, with whom he traded gags, had had his trailer filled to the ceiling with popcorn. In retaliation, Paul had some guys steal a tricked-out Porsche race car which Redford treasured. They snatched it from Redford’s garage and hauled it away. Then, they found another Porsche of the same color at the junk yard. They had it crushed down to a mangled cube and placed in the driveway in front of Redford’s home. Paul relished the thought of Redford’s reaction when he thought that wreck was his beloved racing machine.
Newman’s “dickin’ around” could get a bit rowdy. In a fast car, he was a daredevil. Film insurance rules forbids principal actors from driving during production. A race driver himself, Paul hired a stockcar driver to be his chauffer. To amuse himself on the trips to and from the reservation, when traffic was scarce, he’d have his driver floor it and not lift his foot from the accelerator until they’d arrived at their destination. He told me they had a standing bet on when the engine of their rental car would blow up. Before it did, they got a ticket when clocked at 137 miles an hour on the way to the set one morning. With a hotter car they would have exceeded that number. I forget who he said won the bet.
Once, at the end of the day, Bob and his close pack of helpers were travelling from the set back to Calgary in that big motor home when someone suddenly rammed into the back of it as we’re cruising along at 55 miles an hour. I was sitting up front near the driver. He was a mild-mannered Canadian who’d never run into anything like these wild folks from Hollywood, who came off a movie set each night like lumberjacks coming off a month in the woods. Movie crews can work almost as hard as lumberjacks with longer hours. Bob would have a drink on the way home and often a joint was passed around.
At this moment, someone was ramming the back of his motor home violently and repeatedly. It was a top-heavy unstable Winnebago. This made the nervous driver pale as white flour. He started to panic and shouted out that his rig was gonna roll over. I spoke to calm him. I told him not to swerve nor try to pull off the road, “Just take your foot off the gas and let this rig slow down.” Somebody looked out the back window and announced loudly, “It’s Newman!” On about the fourth or fifth bashing, the bumper of Newman’s car hooked up with the tail of the motor-home. As our dangerously swaying vehicle slowed, the rental car came with it.
We made it to the shoulder of the road hooked up like that. Our driver was frozen in his seat, as some of us piled out to inspect the situation. As we labored to get the mated vehicles detached, Newman looked sheepish like a guilty kid. I checked on Bob. He refused to acknowledge the incident at all. He remained in the back of the motorhome, a drink in hand, continuing his game of backgammon as though nothing had happened. Mr. Altman was not going to acknowledge Mr. Newman’s stupid prank with the slightest nod. When Newman attempted to enter the Winnebago, Bob told us not to let him in.
Newman accepted defeat and turned away. At this moment, in a clash of heroic egos on the battlefield of his movie, Altman was Sitting Bull and Newman was General Custer.
Stewart Brown: Preparing for the November Hilton Head Concours d'Elegance (#2 in the USA), supervising 3 teenagers in Houston this week, visiting 3 great grands in Virginia at the end of the month, Thanksgiving with grands and 3 great grands in Montana, Christmas with grands in Kansas City. Otherwise, Judy and I are enjoying Hilton Head relaxing!
Samuel Corbin: Now that the pandemic is almost over and Canada has reopened her border with U. S. A., I'm now back in my house in Plevna, Ontario. It's just a 15-minute drive to the family cottage on a lake which we've owned since 1945. We've spent a lot of time maintaining it and recently renovating it after a devastating windstorm last May. I've maintained ties with my former place of residence in Gt. Barrington, Massachusetts, by taking part in concert choirs and entering oil paintings in local art shows. Life has been good, and I hope the same for all of our class still on the planet. I look forward to hearing more from everyone else and knowing what we're all up to. I can be reached via E-mail at
gozzbozz@yahoo.com.
Byron Dunham: A sad class note is this: Several of you guys from Class of 1962 have met my Life Partner, Dick Hanna, at Kenyon events, the last being at our 60th Reunion this year. On July 1 Dick passed away unexpectedly in Chicago at our summer condo. Dick fully appreciated my devotion to Kenyon, visiting there with me several times. He himself was a five-year graduate of the University of Illinois's School of Architecture (1961). Thanks for reaching out.
Patrick Eggena: When Covid first came to our hamlet in 2020, I volunteered as a retired physician to help out at the local hospital. But they didn’t want me – said I was too old and not healthy enough. So, instead, I made a memorial for our neighbors who had been emotionally and physically affected by this horrible pandemic by carving sculptures from old black walnut and cherry trees that had fallen on our farm in the tornado of 2018. I arranged 35 of these sculptures in the hayloft of our old Dutch barn into a “Forest” in which my neighbors could reflect on what had happened to them and others in this time of sorrow.
