RIP Loni Anderson

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dixiehack said:
And made a better frozen pizza than you'd expect.
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A story I head years ago. I hope it's true. At a dinner party in ritzy Connecticut where Newman and Joanne Woodward lived, an older woman guest, clearly not into popular culture, asked Newman, "what do you do?" He replied without missing a beat, "Oh, I'm in the salad oil business."
 
Michael_ Gee said:
A story I head years ago. I hope it's true. At a dinner party in ritzy Connecticut where Newman and Joanne Woodward lived, an older woman guest, clearly not into popular culture, asked Newman, "what do you do?" He replied without missing a beat, "Oh, I'm in the salad oil business."
Click to expand...
Saw this on Facebook. AI, probably, but it came out well ...

Paul Newman never liked being called a sex symbol. During the peak of his fame, when magazine covers often declared him the most desirable man in America, he quietly dismissed the attention. At a party in the early 1960s, when a young woman gushed over his "legendary blue eyes," Newman politely excused himself, walked outside, and sat alone for ten minutes. A friend later said he looked visibly uncomfortable, as if the praise embarrassed him more than delighted him. For Newman, attention always had a cost, and he never forgot that.

Newman was well aware of the machine behind Hollywood stardom, but he did not like to feed it. During the release of "The Hustler" in 1961 and later "Cool Hand Luke" in 1967, studios begged him to attend lavish publicity events. He chose instead to race cars on weekends or spend time with his family in Connecticut. When others found satisfaction in adoration, he sought silence. He once told a reporter from "Esquire" that acting was "just something I do, not who I am."

His approach to fame was marked by careful deflection. On the set of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in 1969, Robert Redford recalled Newman's refusal to use personal trailers with grand interiors. "Paul said those things make you soft," Redford noted. Instead, Newman sat under a tree between takes, drinking coffee from a paper cup, often chatting with crew members. His grounding came not from image, but from action, and a quiet refusal to let fame reshape him.

That same sense of purpose extended into his philanthropy. In 1982, Newman launched "Newman's Own" with a simple plan to sell salad dressing and donate the profits. The venture became wildly successful, earning hundreds of millions of dollars for charities. But Newman avoided turning it into a publicity parade. When media outlets offered to highlight the project in glossy spreads, he agreed only if the focus stayed on the children and cancer camps it funded, not himself. At fundraising events, he frequently introduced others before mentioning his own name.

Racing offered another layer of humility. On the track, nobody cared about movie stardom. In the pit, Newman was known as car number 75, not as the star of "The Verdict" or "The Color of Money." Teammates remembered him sleeping in modest motels, waking at 5 AM to check tire pressure, and driving with the focus of a man trying to prove something deeper than skill, perhaps that he was real. He earned respect not by his name, but by his persistence.

Throughout this balancing act, his wife Joanne Woodward was his anchor. Their marriage, which began in 1958 and lasted over five decades, was rarely paraded in the press. At a time when celebrity unions were short-lived and dramatic, theirs was quietly resolute. During a particularly grueling film shoot for "Hud" in Texas, Newman wrote Woodward a letter every day. One included the line, "You keep me human." She kept many of those letters in a drawer beside her bed.

In private moments, friends saw a version of Newman that contradicted the spotlight. On weekends, he cooked pancakes for neighborhood kids. He insisted on driving his own beat-up Volvo to the grocery store. When a neighbor's house caught fire in the 1970s, Newman ran over barefoot to help pull furniture out. The man who seemed untouchable on screen was, in daily life, deeply accessible. It mattered to him that people felt comfortable around him, not awed.

Newman's heartthrob status never sat well with him. He once told a friend, "Being admired isn't the same as being known." His life reflected that distinction. Whether in racing overalls, a camp kitchen for sick children, or beside Joanne at home, he chose substance over spotlight. His humility was not an act, it was his identity.

He wore fame like an old coat, useful in the cold, but never worth admiring in itself.
 
I crossed paths with an older coach in my junior hockey days who was in Slap Shot as one of the opposing players. He played in that league at the time and said Newman loved hanging around the players as they drank after games, sitting in a corner listening to how they talked and interacted with each other. Said he was a terrific guy and not just because he always picked up the tab.
 
My mom was the assistant to the president of the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh when Paul Newman just walked into her office one day. He was in town working on a film and he and Woodward had spent the day at the museum. He filled out one of the comment cards but there was not a box around to drop it off in, so he walked into one of the offices and asked where there was a box for the comment cards. Obviously, she just took it.
 
Huggy said:
I crossed paths with an older coach in my junior hockey days who was in Slap Shot as one of the opposing players. He played in that league at the time and said Newman loved hanging around the players as they drank after games, sitting in a corner listening to how they talked and interacted with each other. Said he was a terrific guy and not just because he always picked up the tab.
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He could have taken them to the Aces.
 
I know a couple writers who did some auto racing coverage at the small track where Newman raced. Said he could not have been a nicer or more modest guy.
 
Story goes out here when he was directing and acting in "Sometimes a Great Notion" he's run a tab at the local watering hole when they had to shoot on the river or otherwise disrupt everyday lift. "Hey fellas, we're doing a little something here, go down to Smitty's, the beers are on me."
There's also a story that while prepping the movie - maybe "to get into character" he walked into a bar with a chainsaw and the bearded stranger let it rip and sawed the legs off the pool table.
And a new one was delivered the next day.
 
Our own Double J wrote some similar anecdotes about Newman during the filming of "Slap Shot." Newman was among the people away from shooting, not exactly wrapped up in his own ego and stardom.
 
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I mangled my attempt at doing a model of Newman's SCCA ride.
 
Poor Loni deserves better than my dumb ass
sidejacking this thread to a Paul Newman tribute,
but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ oh well too bad she wasn't in "Slap Shot."
 
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