Read Online Paul Newman by Shawn Levy - Free Book Online

Weingard. “We had Saturday night parties in every fraternity, and I don’t think Paul ever missed making the total rounds… He had a coonskin coat that he always wore around the campus on party night, and you would know Paul was coming when people would say, ‘Here comes the coonskin coat!’” When there wasn’t a party, he was a regular at the Gambier tavern known as Dorothy’s Lunch. “I lived there,” he recalled fondly. “It had a certain grubbiness about it.” Another classmate, Robert G. Davis, remembered him as a fixture at the tavern: “He gave the impression that drinking and carousing were his primary priorities.”
    But he was also an entrepreneur of some repute. When Kenyon held dance weekends and women were allowed on campus, Newman would make runs to Cleveland and load up on corsages and bouquets to sell to his classmates at a premium. Soon after getting thrown off the football team, Newman became the operator of a student laundry on Gambier’s quaint little main street, renting a storefront and some washing machines and cleaning his classmates’ clothes and linens over the weekend. (“I washed so many socks: that’s why I hate ’em today,” he’d later claim.) A light went on in his head one day, and he modified the business in a way Tom Sawyer would’ve admired: he created a do-your-own-laundry policy, luring customers by bringing in kegs of beer that they could partake of gratis while they scrubbed, dried, and folded their things. It was an inspired bit of promotion: “The beer cost meeleven dollars,” he recalled, “and I was getting 25 percent from the gross of the laundry. Those guys used to bring $250 of laundry each week, and sometimes they got so drunk we put them in the bins with the clothes!”
    And it gave rise to another example of Newman’s Luck—another near-escape of the sort that seemed to bless him regularly. Toward the end of his senior year Newman sold the laundry to a fellow who followed the same business model but was less charmed than his predecessor. “One day a stallion had the misfortune of standing in front of the laundry,” he said. “It wasn’t long after the Saturday beer had been delivered. One of the college customers had put on a pair of boxing gloves and was seen performing an unnatural act on the stallion. Suffice it to say that they shut the laundry down the next day.”
    He escaped blame for that one, but he was still notorious for cutting up. In his senior year Newman took a major part in an invasion of the women’s dorms at nearby Denison College. As a witness put it, “Various groups of men dispersed themselves throughout the buildings, serenading the occupants and at the same time securing dates for Saturday. Meanwhile, Mr. Newman, who had arrived somewhat earlier than the rest, was entertaining the crowd outside. In the tradition of a gentleman from Kenyon, Paul graciously offered to burn his car to amuse the people. This is representative of the chivalry that Kenyon offers.” * On another occasion he convinced a Kenyon policeman to handcuff him to his date during a dance weekend, one of the few times all year when women were permitted on campus; the joke backfired when the young woman needed to use a restroom and she and Newman had to race around the grounds to find the fellow with the key.
    Both of those events occurred in his senior year, by which time it was an even bet whether Newman was better known on campus for his antics or for his acting. From the start of his junior year until he graduated in May 1949, he appeared in or helped stage nine plays:
TheFront Page, Antigone, The Alchemist, R.U.R., Charley’s Aunt, Ghosts, The Taming of the Shrew, Heartbreak House
, and
Rude Awakening
, which was written by his professor James Michael, who directed every one of the productions in which Newman appeared. *
    Later, when asked to discuss the early work of his most famous student actor, Michael would recall “having trouble not casting