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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| November 20, 1978. Paul Newman was on location in Ohio when the phone call came. His only son, Scott, had died in a Los Angeles hotel room. Twenty-eight years old. An accidental overdose of alcohol and tranquilizers. Scott had been taking painkillers for injuries from a motorcycle accident that fall. The combination proved fatal. For years afterward, Newman carried the weight of it. In his posthumous memoir, written in the 1980s and published in 2022 as Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, he described guilt that never left him. "Many are the times I have gotten down on my knees and asked for Scott's forgiveness," he wrote. "I ask for forgiveness for that part of me which provided the impetus for his own destruction." He wondered if there was something he could have said. Some way he might have told Scott he didn't have to be like him. That he didn't have to do "macho things" and could just be himself. "I kept thinking he was going through a phase of adolescent bad judgment," Newman wrote. "I never thought it would be fatal." Scott had struggled his entire life in his father's shadow. Born September 23, 1950, to Paul and his first wife Jackie Witte, Scott was just a child when his parents divorced in 1958. He grew up shuttling between homes, always aware that his father had remarried actress Joanne Woodward and started a new family. In a 1974 interview with the New York Daily News, Scott said, "Out there in Hollywood you can't stand on daddy's feet. You need your own." He told family friend A.E. Hotchner: "It's hell being his son, you know. They expect you to be like him, or they try to get to him through me. I'm Paul Newman Jr, you know what I mean? But I don't have his blue eyes. I don't have his talent. I don't have his luck. I don't have anything… that's me." Scott tried. He dropped out of college in the late 1960s and became a stuntman, making over 500 parachute jumps. He landed roles in films including The Towering Inferno and Breakheart Pass—even working alongside his father. He sang cabaret in small clubs under the name William Scott, trying to establish an identity apart from Paul Newman's legacy. But he also drank. Used drugs. Got arrested. His father bailed him out, helped him, tried to guide him. It wasn't enough. When Scott died, Newman told Hotchner: "There's nothing you can say that will repair my guilt about Scott. It will be with me as long as I live." "There is even something grotesque in saying 'Forgive me,'" Newman wrote in his memoir. "The energy up there that represents that kid will just give me the finger and say, 'Well, what am I supposed to do with that?'" Newman acknowledged his own struggles with alcohol. "In the early 1970s, I think I took it as far as it could go, before realizing I had taken it that far," he wrote. "There are terrible things that happen with booze. I marvel that I survived them." He blamed himself for not understanding the depth of Scott's addiction. "Being a star throws everything out of whack for your kids," he said. Two years after Scott's death, in 1980, Newman established the Scott Newman Center, dedicated to helping healthcare professionals and teachers educate children about the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse. In 1985, he pledged $1 million to create a health communications research center at USC's School of Pharmacy, channeled through the Scott Newman Foundation. The center developed prevention materials and educational programs. In 1994, it launched the Rowdy Ridge Gang Camp in the San Gabriel Mountains—a five-day summer program for low-income mothers and their children affected by substance abuse or domestic violence. Approximately 550 participants attended each session. Newman rarely spoke publicly about Scott's death. But he acted. The center became his answer to the question he couldn't stop asking himself: What would it have taken to avert that? And then, around Christmas 1980, Paul Newman was in his basement mixing up salad dressing. The basement wasn't much—crusty stones, dirt floor, crumbling cement, overhead timbers covered with cobwebs. Three long-vacated horse stalls. The aroma of horses remained. Newman and his friend A.E. Hotchner filled old wine bottles with Newman's homemade olive oil and vinegar dressing to give as holiday gifts to friends and neighbors. They went caroling, handing out bottles. Months later, those friends came back asking for more. "We didn't have anything to stir it with," Hotchner later told The New York Times, "so Newman went to the river outside the barn and got his canoe paddle." What began as a lark turned into something else. Maybe, Newman thought, they could bottle the rest, sell them in local food stores, make a buck. They each put in $40,000. Found a private manufacturer to bottle the dressing. Put Newman's face on the label—a joke that became iconic. On August 25, 1982, Newman's Own shipped its first 500 cases to Stew Leonard's supermarket in Norwalk, Connecticut. Marketing experts predicted $1 million in losses the first year. Instead, Newman's Own generated over $300,000 in after-tax profits. That's when Newman said it. "Let's give it all away to those who need it." Not some of the profits. All of them. Every penny. "When the idea came up, I said, 'Are you crazy? Stick my face on the label of salad dressing?'" Newman later recalled. "And then, of course, we got the whole idea of exploitation and how circular it is. Why not, really, go to the fullest length, and the silliest length, in exploiting yourself and turn the proceeds back to the community?" The company added pasta sauce in 1983. Then lemonade. Popcorn. Salsa. Frozen pizza. The product line grew to over 100 items, sold worldwide. Newman never took a penny of compensation. He called Newman's Own "the practical joke that got out of hand." "The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films," he joked. But Newman understood something about luck. He'd been born in the United States. He'd looked a certain way. He'd made a successful career in film. Scott hadn't had that luck. "I want to acknowledge luck," Newman said, "the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others." "Those who are most lucky should hold their hands out to those who aren't." In 1988, Newman founded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut for children with serious illnesses. The first year, 288 kids attended—kids whose lives had been turned upside down, who needed a place where they could just be children again. In 2005, three years before his death, Newman established Newman's Own Foundation to ensure the company's philanthropic mission would continue after he was gone. When Newman died on September 26, 2008, at age 83, Newman's Own had already donated hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, that number exceeds $600 million—given to thousands of charities worldwide supporting children facing adversity, nutrition programs, healthcare, education, and more. Newman never forgot Scott. In his memoir, he questioned whether he could have done things differently. Whether becoming a movie star had cost his son too much. Whether drinking with Scott—trying to connect—had enabled his addiction instead. "What would it have taken to avert that?" he wrote. "I'm not certain, but I don't think I could have gone into films and been a movie star. I couldn't have drunk." The questions haunted him. But the work continued. The Scott Newman Center operated for over 30 years before closing in 2013 due to lack of funding. But Newman's Own continues, bottle by bottle, jar by jar, giving it all away. Not because it erases the past. It doesn't. Not because it answers the questions that keep a father awake at night. It can't. But because sometimes, when you can't save the one person you love most, you do what you can for everyone else. You mix salad dressing in a basement with a canoe paddle. You put your face on a bottle as a joke. You give away every dollar. And maybe—just maybe—somewhere, a kid gets help before it's too late. A family finds support. A child facing illness gets one week of joy at camp. Paul Newman never claimed his philanthropy made up for anything. He knew better. The guilt stayed with him until the end. But the work? That became something else entirely. A practical joke that saved lives. A salad dressing that fed millions—and then fed millions more through the charity it funded. A father's unanswerable grief, transformed into half a billion dollars for those who needed it most. Newman once said, "Quality trumps the bottom line." But in the end, perhaps what mattered most wasn't the quality of the salad dressing at all. It was what he chose to do with what came after. |
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