Paul Newman: the bad father
CliffB
February 21, 2010
Paul Newman: the bad father
Paul Newman seemed a happy family man. But, as his friend reveals, the
Hollywood star tortured himself over his tragic failure to be a good
father to his self-destructive son
AE Hotchner
Scott Newman on the set of The Great Waldo Pepper. His father had
helped get him a small part in the movie
IMAGE :3 of 4
On the morning of November 21, 1978, I sat down to breakfast, opened
The New York Times and recoiled at this terrible headline: “Paul
Newman’s son, 28, dies of a drug overdose”. It reported that Scott
Newman had died in a Los Angeles hotel room of an accidental overdose
of alcohol and tranquillisers.
According to the article he had been taking pain pills for injuries
sustained in a motorcycle accident and the police presumed that,
combined with alcohol, these had caused his death.
The article described Scott as an actor, stuntman and nightclub singer
and said that his mother was Paul Newman’s first wife, Jackie Witte.
Paul had been a friend for more than 20 years. I had known Scott since
he was a boy. Both had talked to me about the problems between them. I
debated whether to call Paul. What was there to say? But I had to.
I waited a long time for him to come to the phone. “Hotchnik,” he
said. His voice was thick and hoarse.
There was an interminable pause. Paul was by nature a slow responder,
but this was different; he was dealing with an emotion he probably had
never felt before. Finally he said, “It’s a hurt beyond tears.”
The guilt would stay with him for the rest of his life. “How do you
make amends for something you can’t make amends for?” he asked when he
at last talked about it all.
Paul and I first met in 1955 in a funeral parlour on La Cienega
Boulevard in Hollywood. The viewing room had been stripped of its
funereal paraphernalia and outfitted for the rehearsal of The Battler,
a television drama I had written based on a Hemingway short story.
Both Paul and I were at the start of our respective careers and each
of us had come to a halt. Paul had been brought up in Shaker Heights,
an affluent suburb of Cleveland. He had been in a dozen or so plays at
college and after graduation he had performed in summer stock. After a
year at Yale University’s school of drama, he was accepted by the
Actors Studio in New York. Marlon Brando and James Dean were in his
session and they were given the leads in most of the scenes. Paul
admitted he did not have the aggression to get noticed. He picked up
small parts in TV dramas but was turned down for a lead by a director
who didn’t think he carried enough “sexual threat”.
As for me, I was attempting to liberate myself from the dead end of
magazine work. Years before, in 1948, I had visited Ernest Hemingway
at his finca in Cuba to edit his novel Across the River and Into the
Trees for magazine serialisation. This eventually led to my converting
his brief story The Battler into a television play. Paul was cast as a
teenager who runs away from home and encounters an addle-brained
psychopathic former boxing champ. Although 30, he looked much younger.
No sooner had work started on the set than James Dean, who was to play
the boxer, died in an accident involving his souped-up sports car.
After a frantic search for a star to replace him, the director
reluctantly turned to Paul, lamenting having to go with a relatively
unknown actor in this long and difficult part portraying a punch-
drunk, dangerously unbalanced, suspicious ex-pug.
Paul was reluctant, too, not only about replacing his friend James
Dean (“I don’t want to take advantage of anyone else’s misfortune”)
but because he was not sure he could handle the part. In a way I
admired him, but I knew that if he rejected the part the show would
have to be cancelled. And so would my hope of escaping from magazine
writing. I suggested we talk about it. “Sure,” he said, “let’s have a
beer.”
We settled into a booth at a nearby diner. “Maybe I’m fooling myself,”
he told me. “Maybe I need a new line of work. I guess it’s too late to
be a dentist.”
“Listen,” I said, “we’re both trying to get up and out. I have kids,
so do you, so we don’t have a lot of loose time lying around. We could
play it safe but we’d never make it.”
By that time I was ready for a Scotch. Newman flagged the waitress.
“Two Glenlivets and a couple of burgers, medium rare, okay?”
“Any way you want it, sweetheart,” the waitress said. When she
returnedwith the drinks I asked her: “Do you think he’s a sexual
threat?”
“You betcha!” she said, and beamed at him.
During the beginning of rehearsals for the play, Paul was hurting
badly — out of sync, floundering, trying to discover something in
himself to identify with this pathetic boxer whose character was
totally foreign to him.
But one morning the slurred, halting speech, the stiff-legged shuffle,
the jerks and twitches of a stumblebum prizefighter suddenly emerged.
He had started to hang out in Los Angeles near a grubby gym where
local boxers worked out. He had befriended a punch-drunk welterweight
and was slowly assuming the old pug’s persona. It was a thrilling
metamorphosis.
During lunch breaks we usually went to our diner. Most of the time a
lovely young actress named Joanne Woodward came to join us. It was
obvious they were very much in love. They were a beautiful couple and
they illuminated the booth. Paul was still married — and had not only
a son but two daughters — yet it was apparent that in due time his
entente with Joanne would replace the marriage.
After Paul got divorced, Scott lived in Los Angeles with his mother
and sisters and I didn’t meet him until he was 12 or 13. He was
visiting his father in Westport, Connecticut, where I also lived.
When I arrived, Scott was performing nimbly on a trampoline rigged up
on the big lawn. He was a handsome boy, big for his age, with a ready
smile and an easygoing personality. He said that some day he hoped to
do “the real stuff on the high trapeze with Ringling Brothers”.
When Paul, who had been stoking his charcoal grill, came over to join
us, Scott seemed to quieten down and become deferential. Paul said
some good things about his trampolining but they didn’t seem
comfortable with each other.
I didn’t see him again until he was in his late teens. He was 6ft
tall, taller and more muscular than Paul. He had had a very rocky
teenage passage, getting dismissed from one prep school after another
for “detrimental behaviour”, including insubordination, inattention to
his studies and use of drugs and alcohol.
Paul had ascended to the heights of superstardom and being his son was
proving more than Scott could handle. He was handsome but did not have
his father’s classic handsomeness.
I didn’t see much of Paul during this period. He was letting his
extreme popularity get in the way. He was drinking too much and
participating in a freewheeling life without boundaries.
Scott dropped out of college after two years to work on small movie
assignments, mostly stunts on Paul’s films. He made 500 parachute
jumps to get certified as an instructor, then bummed around, working
in construction, driving a ski resort bus, waiting tables, all the
while refusing to ask his father for money or for any real help in
getting acting lessons, his real ambition.
Paul did help him in other ways. George Roy Hill was directing The
Great Waldo Pepper (Paul had turned down the lead, which went to
Robert Redford), and at Paul’s request Scott — by then 23 — was given
a small part, although George refused Scott’s entreaty to let him do
stunts on the wings of the biplane used in the film.
Scott got into trouble on the way to the film’s Texas location.
Staying overnight in Bridgeport, California, he had a lot to drink at
a bar and when the barman shut him down, Scott staggered off
belligerently and slashed the tyres of a school bus that was parked
down the street while boisterously singing his college anthem.
When sheriff’s deputies appeared, he tried to fight them off, but they
succeeded in handcuffing him and getting him into the back seat of the
squad car. While en route to the police station, Scott was able to
raise his legs and kick the driver in the back of the head with his
heavy boot, causing the car to skid off the road.
A while later Paul was in Hollywood co-starring with Steve McQueen in
The Towering Inferno, the disaster movie. Visiting him on the set, I
found him sitting alone off camera, dressed in torn, smoke-stained
clothes. He was subdued, his natural energy diluted.
“First time I fell for the goddamn numbers,” he muttered. “I did this
turkey for a million and 10% of the gross, but it’s the first and last
time, I swear. You want to know what chicken shit goes on? McQueen
actually made a count of our lines of dialogue and when he found out I
had 20 lines more than he did, he made the producer fatten up his part
so he had the same number as me.” Paul’s towering take turned out to
be $12m but it didn’t mollify his feelings about the film.
We had dinner that evening at Romanoff’s, a celebrity restaurant in
Beverly Hills run by a phoney prince. Paul had several drinks before
he looked at the menu. He had just triumphed in The Sting, which had
been an enjoyable romp, but he was brooding.
“I guess you read about Scott’s dust-up with the cops? The papers were
full of it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Poor Scott.”
“Poor Scott, my ass, kicking a cop in the head!
“I got him a really good lawyer,” Paul continued, “and when his case
came up yesterday the judge dropped the felony charge, only convicted
him of a misdemeanour and put him on probation for two years. I paid
the $1,000 fine.
“Of course, the papers made a big deal out of the arrest but nothing
about it being just a misdemeanour. The friggin’ New York Post put the
story on the front page: ‘Paul Newman’s son kicks a cop in the head’.”
“He’s frustrated, Paul. He wants to be an actor, follow in your
footsteps, and he wants you to be proud of him.”
“Yeah, I know. I was that way. I wanted my father to be proud of me,
but he died before I got it going. That’s a big regret — that he never
got to see that I did amount to something.”
“Did it occur to you that Scott getting drunk and vandalising the bus
is like Cool Hand Luke getting drunk and vandalising all those parking
meters? He so wants to be like you.”
“I’d like to talk things out with him but, as you know, I’m not much
of a talker. When we do get together, we talk about sports and other
stuff. We avoid the trouble spots. I’ve got a shrink lined up for him
and I’ve got him set up with a good acting programme. Maybe the shrink
can get to where I should go. It doesn’t help that Scott doesn’t visit
us any more. He doesn’t seem to have any friends. I should see him
more, I guess, but with the movies and all . . .”
Paul’s own father had run the family’s sporting goods store. Paul once
described him as a “brilliant, erudite man with a marvellous,
whimsical sense of humour”. He went on: “I think my father always
thought of me as pretty much of a lightweight. He treated me like he
was disappointed in me — he had every right to be.
“It has been one of the great agonies of my life that he never knew
how I turned out. I wanted desperately to show him that somehow,
somewhere along the line I could cut the mustard. But I never got a
chance. I had such respect for him, as a man, for his integrity. . .
He had so many admirable qualities: ethical, moral, funny. But he was
distant, beyond embrace. When my brother and I went into the war — I
was a radio operator — my father wrote us every single day, each of
us.
“Every day for three years, he sent us a letter. If you go back and
look at the letters, they were distant. There was no familial sense to
them. But there was an obligation to somehow remind us that there was
somebody back home that was thinking about us.”
In the months after his arrest, Scott stopped drinking and using
drugs, joined a health club and exercised regularly. Paul called me
one day to tell me that Scott was going to appear on the highly
popular Merv Griffin talk show that evening. Scott handled himself
very well. He was spontaneous and likeable and radiated good humour.
Paul told me he had congratulated him for his performance and told him
he wanted to help him in any way he could.
When Scott was cast in a guest role on a top-rated TV series, Marcus
Welby, MD, Paul invited a dozen of us to come for dinner and watch.
Paul watched him intently, commented favourably during the commercials
and at the end phoned him in Hollywood and complimented him. Although
we never discussed it, however, I could tell he knew in his heart that
Scott was not destined to have a career as an actor.
Scott did manage to land two or three parts in TV series, but the
assignments petered out and so did Scott’s belief that he could make
it as an actor. He still wanted somehow, some way to prove himself and
he decided to try to establish himself as a cabaret singer, appearing
in small clubs as William Scott. I was in Los Angeles when he was
appearing at a nightspot on Melrose Avenue.
He was drinking at the bar when I arrived and we greeted each other
with a warm hug. He performed a set of three songs with the club’s
three-piece combo. He sang pleasantly, presented himself in an
attractive way, not trying to do too much, styling himself after Frank
Sinatra’s easygoing manner. But the room was not responding, treating
him as a background to the hubbub of their conversations.
Afterwards, Scott and I had a few drinks at the bar. He wanted to talk
about his father, who by then hadn’t spoken to him for several months.
Scott hoped his cabaret act would lead to an album, “something Pop can
be proud of”. I asked him why he didn’t call Paul. “No,” he said, “I
don’t want him to think I want something from him, like money. I don’t
want him to think I can’t support myself.”
“Can you?” I asked.
“No. I borrow from my friends.”
“And when that runs out?”
“That won’t happen,” he said, heatedly. “I’ll always manage. I can do
stunts.”
“Aren’t you still mending from that motorcycle spill?”
“Yeah. I had to quit the health club. It’s my ribs. But I’m mending.
Booze helps and a couple of lines now and then.”
He sipped his drink. “It’s hell being his son, you know. They expect
you to be like him, or they try to get to him through me. All of
f****** Hollywood seems to have screenplays they want me to give to
him. Or for him to show up somewhere or another. 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.
What do they want of me, Hotch? What do I want of me? All I have is
the goddamn name.”
That’s the last time I saw Scott. The album never happened. There were
no more cabaret bookings. Scott was back on alcohol and drugs. He had
no money and often cadged lodging with friends, sleeping on a couch or
the floor. Paul and Joanne, aware of his plight but finding it
difficult to breach his defences, did manage to provide psychiatric
help, which Scott accepted.
On the day of his death, one of Scott’s friends gave him a bottle of
Valium, most of which he swallowed immediately. Feeling panicked, he
called Dr Mark Weinstein, his psychiatrist, who sent a member of his
staff, Scott Steinberg, to stay overnight with him in his rooms at the
Ramada Inn in west Los Angeles.
Scott decided to retire early. He went into the bedroom and took some
quaaludes along with a line of cocaine. Several hours later, Steinberg
became aware that he was struggling to breathe. He immediately called
an ambulance but Scott had lapsed into a coma and efforts to revive
him failed.
It wasn’t until we were in the Bahamas, scouting locations for a
planned Hemingway movie, that Paul finally talked about Scott.
One of the cays we visited, Man-O-War, was a hilly island only 2½
miles from end to end. We found several ideal locations, including the
cemetery, where all of the deceased were buried facing the sea.
An unexpected find was the sail-making business of Norman Albury.
Norman and his wife had been making sails for half a century. The old
foot- pedal sewing machines and handmade tools were still serviceable
and the Alburys’ attractive daughter was producing hand-sewn canvas
jackets. Paul and I ordered a couple of these. I still wear mine all
these years later but, as usual, Paul forgot his somewhere a week
after we returned.
Norman told us about his father and grandfather who were sailmakers
before him, turning out sails for the old schooners and fishing boats
used during prohibition by rum-runners who attempted nocturnal
landings on the Florida shore.
“But now,” Norman told us, “my four sons have no interest in
continuing Albury Sailmakers. They’re into boatbuilding and farming
and such. I’m fine with that. We talked it out and agreed they should
do what’s good for them. A young man has to go his own way or his
future turns on him.”
When we left Norman’s shop, Paul was in a contemplative mood. He took
a path down to the beach and sat on the pink sand under a copse of
palms.
I found a shaded spot with my back against one of the palms. We sat
for a while, then Paul said: “Norman knows how to be a father. The way
he is with his four sons. And I only had one.”
Paul picked up a handful of the fine, pink sand and let it run through
his fingers. He did it again and again.
“I could have talked to Scott, you know. I meant to. I tried to. I’d
invite him for dinner and that afternoon I’d rehearse in my head what
I was going to . . . things to ask him, things that might get him
talking to me. Scott pushed me away, you know. He was so damned
resentful that he was Paul Newman’s son. Anyway, I’d get all rehearsed
and we’d talk but I never got around to the things I’d rehearsed.
“Instead, I’d talk about my car-racing or my race team or about
Scott’s skydiving . . . nothing that touched on any of his problems. I
knew he drank too much and drugged himself but I didn’t know how to
open a door into him. He’d get kicked out of school and I’d talk to
the headmaster so I knew the problems but . . . I knew the problems
and I wanted to call Scott and sit him down to talk but . . . Christ,
all I did was use my influence to get him accepted by another school.”
Paul closed his eyes and leant his head on his arms. “I was the same
with my father,” he said in a muffled voice. “That distance. I
wanted . . . I wanted to feel we were together. That he liked me. That
I was his son. The closest we ever got was when he shook my hand.
“I don’t think I ever hugged Scott or patted him on his arm or back or
rump — the things fathers do. I never talked to him about his being an
actor — can you imagine? He didn’t have the talent — I should have
been realistic with him. There are other things he could do besides
jumping out of aeroplanes. But what did I do? I tried to help him get
more acting jobs, which did nothing but make him more aware of his
failures and more into booze and drugs to cover up his inadequacies.
My own father died before I got going as an actor, so he died thinking
I was a failure. That still bothers me . . . a lot.”
Paul lay back on the sand and looked up at the sky between the palm
fronds.
“Scott died before he had a fair chance to be a success . . . at
something,” he said to the sky. “I think about him . . . often . . .
it hurts. The guilt. The guilt.
All I could have done . . . and didn’t do.”
I said: “You did what you could.”
“We know a lot of fathers, don’t we, Hotch? How many of them have had
kids who gave up and committed . . . and died? Oh hell, why don’t I
say it — committed suicide. That’s what Scott was doing — slowly
committing suicide. And I was watching it happen. And all I did was
make more movies and be a big star.”
“Paul, listen to me. I’ve been around from the beginning. I’ve watched
you with Scott and I’ve been alone with him and listened to what he
had to say. He had the resentment that a boy has when his father
divorces and leaves him fatherless — in Scott’s case, leaves him in a
house with his mother and two sisters, three females who pretty much
ignored him.
“Unlike most boys, Scott had a father who everyone knew — intimately
you might say — who was on the big screen at the neighbourhood
cinemas, was all over the magazines, the newspapers, television. He
was being a father to his new children in his new home. He simply
didn’t have the time to manage more than one family along with his big-
time career.”
“Hotch, you’re as good a friend as I’ve got. I had to let all of this
out of me or I’d explode. There’s nothing you can say that will repair
my guilt about Scott. It will be with me as long as I live.”
“You’re being much too hard on yourself.”
“No, I’m not being hard enough.”
© AE Hotchner 2010 Extracted from Paul and Me by A E Hotchner to be
published by Simon & Schuster on March 4
Alls Quiet
> From The Sunday Times
> February 21, 2010
>
> Paul Newman: the bad father
This was interesting to read, but--so what? Fans of stars generally
remain fans no matter how heartless an idol's personal life proves him
or her to be. The same things in this excerpt could be said of Johnny
Carson, Dean Martin, tons of other mid-century celebrities. And now
they're all dead, and karma has settled in one way or another.
tomcervo
>
> read more »
Plenty of bad fathers, but Newman called himself one--and he seems
more like an average one to his son, making the usual mistakes that
most fathers make, but at a higher level of wealth and therefore
consequence. He tried. It's the hardest job in the world, and if
you've done it, you know how close you came to failure.
steve march
"Alls Quiet" <mut...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:8541a0e3-db95-4444...@f8g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
What in that article made him out to be a 'bad father'? Yes the son's life
was tragic and ended tragically. That sometimes happens regardless of the
job one does parenting.
moviePig
> On Feb 20, 10:05 pm, CliffB <fl...@gosympatico.ca> wrote:
>
> > From The Sunday Times
> > February 21, 2010
>
> > Paul Newman: the bad father
>
> > Paul Newman seemed a happy family man. But, as his friend reveals, the
> > Hollywood star tortured himself over his tragic failure to be a good
> > father to his self-destructive son
> Plenty of bad fathers, but Newman called himself one--and he seems
> more like an average one to his son, making the usual mistakes that
> most fathers make, but at a higher level of wealth and therefore
> consequence. He tried. It's the hardest job in the world, and if
> you've done it, you know how close you came to failure.
It's an often painful job, anyway, especially if you hold yourself
responsible for bad (or good) deals from a deck that's always
stacked. For one thing, among philosophies of parenting, 'benign
neglect' has a fairly good track record (last I heard). For another,
the minimal info posted here leaves me feeling Paul Newman's self-
blame was at least partly his way of grieving.
--
- - - - - - - -
YOUR taste at work...
http://www.moviepig.com
Michael Black
I was wondering the same thing, All kinds of children of famous people
have died prematurely, and that doesn't automatically make the parents
bad.
A bad parent is likely to be a significant factor in itself, doing bad
and horrible things to the children.
Michael
Dano
It has to be tough for any kid to live up to expectations when one has such
a famous and successful parent. That factor alone must be hard on the
relationship. Father/son (or any parental/child) relationships can be hard
enough without that added stressor.
aemeijers
probably made no more parenting errors than most. But I have to wonder
how hard it is to be the kid of a famous parent, especially somebody in
the entertainment business. It is almost a given that you will never
measure up to their professional success (there are exceptions, like
Micheal Douglas, or Martin Sheen's kids, but they are rare.) And given
the nature of being a major star or CEO or whatever, it is likely you
will have to stand in line to have quality time with them, assuming they
aren't gone on location or the road for weeks or months at a time. I
suspect all this is what Mr. Newman was feeling guilty about- maybe if
he had worked in a factory, his son wouldn't have gotten lost. ISTR the
pain over his son was one of the reasons Newman became a semi-recluse,
and put so much into his late-life philanthropy.
Of course, some famous parents are just whack jobs- was anybody really
surprised that Cher's kid was screwed up? Anybody have any illusions
how Madonna's kids will turn out?
--
aem sends...
CliffB
Just fyi, It was his good friend AE Hotchner who penned the article,
but as surmised in one of the article comments, perhaps it was not his
own headline title attached but the newspaper's editorial choice.
"absent" or "distant" father might be more accurate. At least Newman
had the conscience and introspection to question himself. Another
celebrity father in the news recently, michael Douglas, has also
expressed some remorse in re: his kid's problems. Kirk incidentally
also had a son die of a drug overdose.
CliffB
> Michael Black wrote:
> > On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, steve march wrote:
>
It was less than impressive though, how he just picked up and moved on
with Woodward, leaving his existent family in the dust as he patched
out. Who knows what the circumstances were of his original marriage
though; lovelss? on who's account? Did the 1'st wife get custody
because of ex-husband's bad or poor behavior, or just because Newman
was deemed too busy, or he plain didn't want custody or figured she
had more time on her hands for the offspring?
Tristan daCunha
this kid he made. Paul was a POS!!!
Flasherly
> > more like an average one to his son, making the usual mistakes that
> > most fathers make, but at a higher level of wealth and therefore
> > consequence. He tried. It's the hardest job in the world, and if
> > you've done it, you know how close you came to failure.
Been wondering about the source inspiration for a particularly unusual
predicament Newman might have found himself when leading into a post-
apocalyptic scifi type, Quintet. So drear.
Dick Waterman
magazine work. Years before, in 1948, I had visited Ernest Hemingway
at his finca in Cuba to edit his novel Across the River and Into the
Trees for magazine serialisation. This eventually led to my converting
his brief story The Battler into a television play. Paul was cast as a
teenager who runs away from home and encounters an addle-brained
psychopathic former boxing champ. Although 30, he looked much younger.
No sooner had work started on the set than James Dean, who was to play
the boxer, died in an accident involving his souped-up sports car.
After a frantic search for a star to replace him, the director
reluctantly turned to Paul, lamenting having to go with a relatively
unknown actor in this long and difficult part portraying a punch-
drunk, dangerously unbalanced, suspicious ex-pug.
------------------------
I'm not going to argue with the great Hotchner but I clearly remember
that James Dean was up for "Somebody Up There Likes Me," the Rocky
Graziano biography that was being filmed when Dean was killed and Paul
got the role.
I think that he is confusing his boxing biographies . . .
SoCally
I think any parent who loses a child to drugs feels like they must
have been a "bad" parent. Even when their kids die from something else
they still feel guilt. It's just part of being a parent.
I think this article is just that guy name-dropping and acting like
people are supposed to know who the hell he is.
Michael O'Connor
> Of course, some famous parents are just whack jobs- was anybody really
> surprised that Cher's kid was screwed up? Anybody have any illusions
> how Madonna's kids will turn out?
>
Or Michael Jackson's kids, for that matter.
For some celeb kids, the famous parent truly screwed up their kids on
purpose, like Joan Crawford. And there are other cases where the
movie star parent had some truly bizarre habits, such as Jerry Lewis
often coming home still in his Spaz character when he was shooting his
comedies, which must have been difficult for their children. But in
other cases I think the fact that the movie star parent was off
somewhere in the world most of the time shooting this or that movie or
doing the requisite Hollywood parties, and not able to be there for
their kids like regular parents. Being a movie star is not a 9 to 5
job..
William George Ferguson
And if one is truly a bad parent, it's probably not just going to show up
in one of your six children. The other five, three of whom are or have
been fairly much in the public eye, all seem to have turned out alright.
(OK, Nell's into organic farming, but she's figured out a way to make money
at it)
--
I have a theory, it could be bunnies
Tell it like it is.
wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Feb 2010 13:39:55 -0500, Michael Black <et...@ncf.ca> wrote:
> >On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, steve march wrote:
>
>
> - Show quoted text -
Book: "Drugs at My Door step"
by Art Linkletter
Lost his 20 year-year old daughter Diane to LSD.
Sir Blob
> From The Sunday Times
> February 21, 2010
>
> Paul Newman
terribly banal all this, cuz he does his 'regretting' when he's old
and crabby and with too much space, freudian competition at the behest
of what he did at the time that counts, divorcing, ok, but another
tale of a millionaire failing is inexcusable, cuz he wasnt even middle
class and draggd down by timetables, he was todays michael douglas, a
total failure, having a son dealing coke in NY, please. ''im not much
of a talker'', wot kind of platitude is that, coming from one of the
most expressive peeps around? but yeah, we'd have to see how the
others turned around, how self pitying and incompetent the kid was,
exactly how solipsistic paul was on the individual when he churned out
a sentimental immature crap like harry and son and stuff like hud or
cool hand luke drowned in moral failures of the sons. not much of a
talker? the actor from the hustler?
correcting someone elses comment, the three with joanna woodward dont
count, they prolly got tons of care, its the 2 broads and this scott
guy we'd ave to examine oh moralists of the rampf ng