I was fortunate enough to know Paul Newman. Years ago, Paul reached out to me to go with him and Christopher Plummer to testify on an issue at the state capital in Hartford. I agreed, even though I wasn’t completely clear on what the issue was. I figured if Paul was bothered about something, it was at least worth my time to listen to him explain it on the drive to the capital. It turned out to be about protecting your movie image from being used at a certain point after you were deceased to promote a commercial product, without your or your survivors’ permission. I was amazed that such a law wasn’t already in place. I testified.
I later had contact with Paul when I was working on my book If I Only Knew Then… learning from Our Mistakes. Paul was the only contributor out of eighty-two people who said he hadn’t learned anythingfrom his mistakes, but he took comfort in knowing they were the same mistakes—not new ones. I can only assume I didn’t know Paul well enough, because I never saw him make anymistakes.
I last saw him about a year and a half before he died, when he and his wife, Joanne Woodward, asked me to be a part of a fund-raiser for the Westport Country Playhouse. It was to be an evening of love poems. I consider reading poetry aloud not one of my callings—which is an understatement—but I agreed to do it, because it was Paul and Joanne who asked.
About an hour before we were to begin, Paul quietly asked me to remind him to blow his nose before we went on. When we were called to the stage, I said, “Paul, blow your nose.” He did. Philip Seymour Hoffman observed all this, and I told him, “That’s why they got me.”
If it was a worthy cause, you didn’t have to get Paul Newman, because he was already there.