Lunch alone with Paul Newman

He arrives on a scooter, a flurry of stunned fans in his wake. He dismounts gingerly, pausing for that familiar moment as yet another stranger puts an arm around his shoulder. He won’t remove his shades for the picture, though. He doesn’t do that anymore, no doubt sick of playing a supporting role to those legendary eyes. 

I’m sitting, nursing a now-cold cup of coffee, wondering how to catch his eye and avoiding the lurking PR. I see a man handing Newman water and fruit and vaguely recognise him – a year earlier I had covered the Miami Grand Prix, focussing on the Newman-Haas team. Turns out the guy with the water is Newman’s minder. And I can see him gesturing to me: apparently Newman not only read my story, but liked it. So, in what may have been the finest moment of my entire career, the minder comes over and speaks. ‘Paul says you and he can have lunch in his trailer.’ Second best moment? The greasy PR beetles over as we’re headed to the trailer and I hear Newman say, ‘not you, just me and him.’

It turns out that sometimes it’s good to meet your heroes after all. Paul was an engaging, generous spirit who gave serious thought to every question. He also made it clear the 15-minute rule did not apply. The interview would end when I had no more to ask.

And, in one of the many ironies that surrounded the man, then 78-year old Paul Newman had the body of a racing driver. Slightly built and perfectly proportioned with a strong hint of stringy toughness. In fact, Paul Newman was a racing driver despite not getting seriously involved with racing until he was 47 years old. He was still competing and had recently finished second in a Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) event he’d led for several laps. Two years later he drove in his eighth and last Daytona 24 Hours, an 80-year-old film star sharing a Crawford-Ford with race ace superstars Cristiano da Matta and Sébastien Bourdais.

He was keen to make the link between his profession and his hobby. ‘It’s interesting about passion,’ he told me. ‘It bleeds back into things you have maybe lost your sense of passion about. As [my wife] Joanne has always said, I got so bored with acting that I started racing out of boredom. And the passion that I developed for that fed right back into the acting. I have no doubt at all that I’ve done my best work as an actor since I started racing.’

It’s also plain that it was the competitive nature of motorsport that drove Newman’s passion. ‘Yes, that’s true, I’m a very competitive person,’ he explained. ‘And it’s actually quite difficult to be competitive about acting because there’s no real criteria that would be accurate to judge what a good performance is. In racing, though, it is absolutely clear. Here at Long Beach, for example, you’ve got a course which is two miles long, top speeds of around 190mph and the space between the second place car and fifth place car has been as little as 9/100ths of a second. Now just go figure out how many precise things have to happen to slow a car down, getting the right gear, dealing with high speed turns, and all that. To still have four cars within 9/100ths of each other is just staggering!’

Alone with Newman inside the motorhome. He attacks a piece of steak with remarkable enthusiasm, gestures at me to carry on while he digs in. I’m offered some grub of my own, but I don’t want to waste a second chewing food. So I ask another question, Newman holding my gaze intently, thinking hard about his answer, completely engaged and engaging. And for the first and only time, something approaching bitterness and regret.

The question was about the best place he’s ever driven. ‘Le Mans was such a great thrill,’ he says. ‘But the delight I had with that experience was absolutely destroyed by the paparazzi who were relentless. I couldn’t get from the trailer to the car, I couldn’t get into the car at night without 150 flashbulbs going off. I couldn’t even get out of the pits sometimes. They were…. they were just everywhere. And so that’s the reason I never went back to Le Mans.’

That was 1979. Newman co-drove a Porsche 935, an experience about which he was exceedingly, and genuinely, modest. ‘That was the most powerful race car I’d ever driven and you know, I don’t think I was very good there,’ says Newman. And then a little more wistfully: ‘I just wish I’d got to know the place a bit better.’

For the record, that mighty and fearsome 935 Newman claims he drove so badly managed to finish the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans in second place. Nor was he a short stint fair weather friend. He did his full share, come rain (of which there was a lot) or shine, day or night. We should all drive so badly.

I mention a couple of my racing heroes and wonder who it is that Newman rates. After a thoughtful ‘horses for courses’ preamble, he settles on Mario Andretti. ‘I tell you, you walk down the hallway of Mario’s house in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and it’s like a racing museum. That hallway must be 40 feet long and it’s just got shelves five deep with trophies, which is deeply impressive. The reason I rate him is he’s been in more different driving disciplines than anybody else – F1, dirt cars, sprint cars, CART, and he’s won races in all of them.’

Paul Newman on the pit wall, crumpled tan jacket and faintly comical white trainers. He has swapped the sunglasses for reading glasses so he can study the monitors. Competitor cars come into the pits for a final splash of methanol and Newman discreetly times their stops on his wristwatch. So enthralled with the action in front of him that his mouth hangs slightly open as he studies the information on the monitor. He looks like exactly what he is, the co-owner of a front running race team.

And then the final lap. It’s an undramatic ending and the mood in the pits is subdued, businesslike. As the last car crosses the finish line, Paul begins to applaud, the rest of the team hurriedly joining in. Newman steps carefully down from the pitwall and makes toward his scooter. A fan has been waiting patiently for his ambush opportunity, and soon, Newman has another stranger’s arm wrapped around his shoulder. 

So Paul Newman hesitates briefly for the shot, then climbs aboard his scooter for the short run back to base. He weaves carefully through the crowds who realise, too late, who he is. 

And my interview? After more than an hour, I’ve asked everything – excluding movies and eyes – so I ask Paul what he’d like to talk about. And he says, ‘badminton’.

So we talk about badminton.