I Come Here to Praise Fast Eddie, Not to Bury Him

"For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble."

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

The story begins as many stories do; I met him in the countryside. I was staying in a quiet cabin nestled in the middle of the woods, at least two zip codes away from civilization. The cabin belonged to my grandfather, and my twelfth year was still hovering threateningly on the horizon (given that year 12 is the one I recognize as changing it all). The night was long and sticky, hollowed out by a day’s worth of diversion, and the isolation from even the closest of our neighbors left us with nothing to do. Admittedly, it was probably his insertion into what had been a dull night that’s made the memory so crystalline for me, even years later.

It was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and it was the worst television reception in the history of the medium. Seriously. In fact, I’m pretty sure the generator gave out somewhere before Big Daddy’s last speech and left me staring at a blank screen. It was CBC, and it was years beyond my maturity level, so I didn’t grasp what the hell was going on, for the most part. I was still operating on a Lion-King = good, anything else = bad level of quality assurance. So the nuances of the film fell on deaf ears, never mind the subtext (which they skate over in the film anyway, but that’s something I do on my own: Brick? Gay? Nah, not with those arms). So the film itself was something less than remarkable for me, with one exception. I remembered that man.

Maybe a leap for an eleven year old to make, to stamp a handsome face with a sexual buzz based on nothing more than a fuzzy television reception. He probably stole my heart that night, even if I didn’t know it at the time. In the following years, this moment had created what can be called a buzz around the name Paul Newman. Still, nothing crystallized for me until years later. Caught up in my adolescent cinephilia, hopelessly childlike in my single-minded devotion, I was gulping down the AFI 100 in fives, a list which, to the uninformed, is the logical starting point in an education of cinema (to the informed: it is not). I was rounding the Westerns of the list, something which I hated then and still hate now. It was for that reason that I came to meet the Paul Newman that would define my preoccupation; otherwise, would I have ever picked up Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Doubtful.

After I’d seen that…forget about it. No way, no how, was anyone ever replacing Paul for me. He was The Movie Star, the one face that would be pinned to my inner teenager’s bedroom wall forever, provided that my inner teen was trapped in the early 1960s. He was the Charmer, with that rapier wit, that good-natured bravado—all packaged with the assurance that, no matter what the role, there was a good man underneath the trappings. He was the Good Ol’ Boy, all impish humor and Southern sass. And, I only found this out by accident, after I was done drooling over those electric blue peepers, he was a Great Actor, distracting his audience with his tangible charms while he slipped in one thoughtful, controlled performance after another.

Today’s a sad day. Long live ol’ blue eyes and the forever graceful.

Paul Newman, 1925-2008

originally published Saturday, September 27, 2008