“I plan to swear a lot at our lunch.”
Lunch would happen, of course, at a long table in the dining hall, at the original Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut. It’s a massive red building at the heart of the camp Newman founded in 1988, for seriously ill children. He wanted the camp to have a Wild West theme; wanted sick kids to have a non-hospital place to, in his words, “raise a little hell.” Our lunch would happen with the campers piled next to him on the long benches—some from this world, who survived their cancer and sickle cell anemia, and a few from the world currently housing Paul Newman; kids still loud, still bald, but no longer in pain.
He would just materialize into his old laughing self, on the bench across from me, and reach for the Newman’s Own salad dressing—ubiquitous on the camp tables, along with the pasta sauce and the lemonade—and make a joke about how it’s healthier now than it was in the nineties . . .
The first time I met Paul Newman, my co-author, Larry Berger, and I were trying to scrape money together to write a book about the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, and it was 1990. I was just a few months out of college, Larry and I had been doing creative writing with the campers over the summers, it all seemed like a good book idea—kids, poems, illness, campfires—and a board member from the camp wrangled a dinner to find us some funding, and there, suddenly materialized at the dinner, was Paul Newman. The first time I saw him he was in the kitchen of the host of that dinner, making his own salad dressing from scratch.
Newman (and nobody called him anything but “Newman” in my experience) wrote a check to fund the first stage of the book project on the spot. Later, he wrote the foreword to the book, something he did painstakingly and with tremendous care, because he kept saying he wasn’t a good writer, except he really was. He wrote the chapter by listening, listening, listening and then creating something deeper than mere sparkly words. I just watched and learned as he wrote that foreword like he made vinaigrette; like he was inventing the form for the first time.
Newman later helped us promote the book, with a TV hit and radio interviews and lots of time with reporters who wanted to talk about movies and not his camp or his campers.
I worked at Newman’s camp for four summers. At camp, none of the children knew who Paul Newman was when he visited, which is, I suspect, why he visited so often. I worked on the book for a year. One time I picked him up to visit a sick camper in the hospital and he wouldn’t let me drive because, he said, I drove like a Canadian, trying to ingratiate myself to the mystifying world of high-speed vehicles. Newman was, after all, a seasoned race car driver. I was twenty-two and in possession at that time of my brother’s sweet red Toyota MR2 and drove politely and carefully, eager to let anyone pass and merge as needed. The way I drove that car made Newman so very sad for me. This is a memory I have managed to repress.
When Newman died, the obituary I wrote for Slate was mostly about how for him, Hollywood fame was purely transactional: He seemed to have used everything he’d ever achieved as a celebrity as a lever to do good things for others. He cared more about kids, and the environment, and addiction, and healthy food, and peace, and dialogue, than some of the people who actually did that work professionally. And in this modern world of the celebrity-millionaire-activist-philanthropist, we forget how much he invented that form as well. Long before it was understood that every actor had a cause and a platform, he had both. And I have no memory of grandiosity. I think he just tended to think, “Hey, I can make some calls, and good people will fall in,” and good people always fell in. He tended to view all of it—the money, the success, the adulation—as a freakish accident that required paying forward. The philanthropy felt like a means of material unburdening, not an imposition of morality on an immoral world.
I’d open my miracle lunch by asking him how he’d managed to raise money for good causes with minimal fanfare and zero ego. I would glug down camp lemonade (Newman’s) and ignore the small floating bug in it and ask how someone so enormous had led such a contained life. People would follow Newman on any new philanthropic venture because he was always convinced it would be easy. If there was a glitch in any plan, he’d find a workaround that would also save the wildlife and also foster international discourse. All the humanitarian and ecological benefits that followed in the slipstream of his ventures were just more happy accidents. He believed he had simply been lucky, and he shrugged off the possibility that he had earned a thing by hard work. Or something called talent. And that, too, is a rarity, in the modern age of celebrity-philanthropist. I would ask him how he’d come to feel so lucky, despite personal tragedies, so lucky that the world handed him luck.
One time Newman called me very early in the morning to talk about the foreword for the book. At this point I had been on camp staff for four years, and he woke me from a deep, drooling sleep. I swore like a trucker before I realized it was really Paul Newman on the phone. Eventually, I also repressed this hideous memory. He loved that story. I plan to swear a lot at our lunch.
Here’s the thing I haven’t yet communicated: I only actually hung out with the man perhaps ten to fifteen times, but he was always ducking out from whatever people expected him to be, and always smiling at it. When I think about our lunch now, years after he is gone, in my head, I am mostly just grieving aloud at him about how everything he and I had believed about the world is upside down now. I am so famished for the optimism and belief that the world is capable of repair that I learned from him, that I would lunch on an IV drip of hope alone. In my head I am desperate to understand how the worldview I learned at his camp and his charities—that you make lemonade and pasta sauce, then give the money away, and the world gets better—went so thoroughly upside down in two decades.
The detailed lunches I recall with Newman happened at the dining hall in the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. He’d slide in quietly at a long table full of kids who were, in some cases, terribly ill, and he’d just be a guy with white hair they’d never heard of. He’d engage the kid sitting next to him in a lengthy conversation, usually about the food or fishing. The staff would try not to break out in flop sweats. I would for sure expect to have a whole bunch of kids in wigs and prosthetic arms at this lunch. That would make it hard to talk. But he’d be happier. I think wherever he is, the kids he built a home for at his camps are whole.
Another thing about Newman? He’d come to camp and grab a few kids and take them out on a perfectly safe boat on a fully stocked lake and they would fish and the counselors would be frantic because they were all out there so long baking in the sun, and maybe a kid missed his meds, but they’d all come back laughing, and the kid would be better and happier all summer, and Newman would go back to the real world. Often the kid had no idea who the guy on the boat even was. But you always suspected Newman believed camp was actually the real world for these kids. I think that was why he loved it there. I mostly want to ask him whether the place he is now is more like camp or more like Hollywood. I’m fairly certain there are long tables with ranch dressing and lemonade and very little silicone or Instagram.
So that’s where I’d have my lunch with Newman. At a long table filled with singing campers. Probably just pasta, cookies, and lemonade. Nothing intentional or fussy, for sure. I guess if I brought salad there would be salad dressing. He’d have his dark glasses on, and the baseball cap. You do get used to the eyes, but it takes a while.
I would keep talking on and on about injustice and poverty, and I suspect he’d find me boring with all my agita. He’d talk to the kid on his left. I would remember to thank him for teaching me about living an authentic life, separate from what the world needs me to be. I would tell him that virtually everything I now know about using a huge public platform to ask others to be active repairers of the world, I learned from him alone. Mostly, I think I would want to thank him for letting me see in my early twenties that marrying the absolute love of my life and doting on my children is an authentically and deeply lived life; that living a relatively small life but doing meaningful things is much more important than fame.
And when I can stop talking, I want him to persuade me again of his weird and elusive philosophy—the inversion of what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error—his abiding belief that people are all basically pretty good, and they all mostly just want to do good, and that errors and frailties aren’t character so much as quirks. I want him to remind me that we all have more in common than we ever supposed. I want him to tell me again that there is no global problem that can’t be fixed if a bunch of people allow themselves to believe in solutions.
I would say something about how this country needs genuine moral wisdom and leadership now more than ever, and he would laugh at me and say he has neither. I would say once again that he always seemed more kid than grown-up to me, except that he got things done so quietly, effectively, without fanfare, that I think he was, in secret, the only grown-up I saw for a long time. I am ravenous for humility in public life, and he was the last, best version of that I ever knew.
I have been planning this lunch with Paul Newman for more than a year. I think it would break his heart, knowing what this country has done to the kids—especially the poor kids—he thought about all the time. Perhaps because he always seemed to live his life so close to the seam of childhood, he would be the person most apt to understand that a whole generation of American children are being poisoned and polluted not just by toxic air and water but by filthy ideas about race and religion and violence that we believed we had left behind in the 1950s. He would be the one to ask what is really happening to this cohort of children raised in this moment of mass public shame and bullying and Twitter-terror. I like to think that he would have an answer or at least know who to call for the answer, by the time we set down our forks.
Maybe because the two qualities I most prized in this man were his optimism and his capacity to listen, I actually hate the idea of telling him what we’ve done to the world he unspooled for me, right out of college. I can’t even imagine reporting what his beloved country has done to American childhood. This makes me hope that he doesn’t show up for lunch. But oh, I hope he does.
Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor at Slate, and in that capacity, she writes the “Supreme Court Dispatches” and “Jurisprudence” columns. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Commentary, among other places. She won a 2013 National Magazine Award for her columns on the Affordable Care Act. She has been twice awarded an Online Journalism Award for her legal commentary and was the first online journalist invited to be on the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. Ms. Lithwick has testified before Congress about access to justice in the era of the Roberts court. She has appeared on CNN, ABC, and The Colbert Report and is a frequent guest on The Rachel Maddow Show. Ms. Lithwick earned her BA from Yale University and her JD from Stanford University.