Paul Newman and the sundance kid called Clea
Clea Newman opens up to Barry Egan about her famous parents Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and the ‘perfect storm’ that led to marriage to husband Kurt
IN 1945, Aviation Radioman Third Class Paul Newman, assigned to Pacific-based replacement torpedo squadrons in World War II, was sent to the USS Bunker Hill before the Battle of Okinawa. In a stroke of fate, the Ohio boy’s life was saved when his pilot got an ear infection and was unable to fly bomber missions. When the replacements were killed in action in the Battle of Okinawa, Paul Newman was forever left with the belief that life is mostly about luck.
It also shaped his view that he should use his life to help those who were not as lucky as him in life.
In 1982, he set up Newman’s Own, a line of food products with all the proceeds going to charity. In 1988, he set up the Hole In The Wall charity camp in Ashford, Connecticut, for children with serious illness, which grew into affiliated programmes all over the world in the SeriousFun Children’s Network; in 1994, he founded Barretstown, a not-forprofit camp for children with cancer and other serious illnesses located at Barretstown Castle in Co Kildare.
Continuing her father’s legacy, Clea Newman was in Ireland last weekend to launch the Barretstown pop-up shop at Kildare Village to mark the occasion of the organisation’s 25th anniversary.
“In the first year of Barretstown they served 120 children and this year they will have served 50,000,” she says. “As my dad would say — a child who has a serious illness, the best thing you do is just let them be a kid again.”
No pampered Hollywood movie star’s revolting uber-brat, Clea has devoted her life to giving back to those less fortunate. The exact spit of her dad and her mother Joanne Woodward, Clea was also fortunate enough to have “had as normal a childhood as you could have under the circumstances. When we were in California it was different. There was a lot more paparazzi but when we were in Connecticut it was totally normal. Everyone did chores.”
Did Clea’s mother keep her Oscar in 1958 — Best Actress in a Leading Role — for The Three Faces Of Eve on the mantelpiece?
“Yeah... but it was probably right next to my finger painting!” she laughs. Clea’s earliest childhood memory is, she says, “a pretend memory”.
“I used to remember walking around Paris and I would tell my mother stories about Paris. And she would say, ‘Honey, you couldn’t possibly know that because you weren’t born yet. I was pregnant with you’.”
Was her mother actually in Paris while she was carrying Clea in her tummy?
“No! It was my imagination!” laughs Clea, adding that her earliest actual memory is being in Connecticut “running around the yard. We had an old farm house right on the river. We were very outdoors-y. I don’t know if we swam in the river that much. I don’t know if this was because there were leeches or my [older] sister [Nell] used to tell me that there were leeches. I think I waded in there. We were a very casual family. My parents were very hands-on.” Her mother wanted Clea to be a ballerina; her father wanted her to be a concert pianist.
Asked at what age Clea realised that her parents were different to other kids’ parents, Clea says: “Probably when I was 12 or 13 years old, but I don’t think I thought they were necessarily different.”
Did Clea see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a child and then say to her father: ‘Dad — is that you?’
“When I saw that film, it scared me more than anything else, because I was little. I think I was six or seven when it came out and we saw a screening. My dad was sitting right behind me with my mother, and right before the end of the film he got up and went to the bathroom because he didn’t want to deal with all the press. So he went to hide in the bathroom. And, of course, at the end he comes out and all the guns blaze; I thought he died, because I had turned around and he was gone.” To this day Clea says she still can’t watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — the 1969 cowboy movie in which her dad played Butch Cassidy opposite Robert Redford’s Sundance Kid — “without crying”, primarily because her dad’s character gets killed (we presume because the last scene is freeze-framed) in a hail of bullets courtesy of soldiers in Bolivia. Clea’s dad died in real life of lung cancer on September 26, 2008, aged 83. He was survived by wife Joanne and his five daughters: Stephanie and Susan (from his first marriage to actress Jackie Witte) and Nell, Lissy and, of course, Clea from his five-decade long love-in/marriage to Joanne. (Paul’s only son Scott died at the age of 28 of an accidental drug OD in 1978.)
Clea lives in Westport in Connecticut with her husband Kurt Soderlund. “One of my sisters also lives in Westport. The rest of them are kind of spread out so I don’t see them as much.” Her mother, who lives “one town over”, Clea describes as “the kindest, most maternal woman. Growing up, my mother was like my best friend. I adore her. She is classy and works so hard.”
Town and Country magazine wrote that Clea’s parents’ romance was “sealed” while shooting The Long, Hot Summer in 1958 (“their final collaboration 32 years later in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, they co-starred in 10 films together”.) Thus sealed, Paul and Joanne seemed like Hollywood’s sturdiest marriage, America’s coolest couple.
Sex symbol Paul famously remarked when asked about his faithfulness to Joanne: “Why go out for burgers when you’ve got steak at home?”
“My mother said that made her sound like a piece of meat,” Clea says now.
Joanne was with the same man all her life. Did Clea inherit that romantic philosophy?
“She believed that when you found the right person that you would know,” says Clea. “And all the other stuff that had gone on around you doesn’t matter because you are committed to that person and the relationship and you are committed to the family. All that other stuff is just noise. Don’t focus on the noise. The noise happens.”
Did Clea ignore the noise when she was younger? “When you’re young the noise is the most exciting part,” she laughs, “It’s only when you get older that you realise that noise is just noise. Or, it is for me.”
Like her parents, Clea is a grounded and engaging person, a vibrant sundance kid still at 54. She talks about why she never became a mother with a characteristic honesty. “I got married very late in life.” Why was that? “I have always been very independent.” Too independent? “I wouldn’t say too independent. I was just always very independent. I was engaged a couple of times but I was not... I had so much I wanted to do that I wasn’t focussed on getting married and settling down and having children, and unfortunately by the time I had found the right guy, I was old!” she laughs.
Did Clea maybe almost self-sabotage earlier romantic relationships because no relationship could live to that most perfect one of her parents?
‘I miss my father, horribly. There isn’t a day I don’t think about him’
“I don’t know if that was part of it; I think for me I just... I always earned my own money, took care of myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t need a man; I just didn’t want to feel obligated to constantly follow someone around and I had absolutely no interest in doing that. It was tricky for every guy I dated, because I wouldn’t do that they ended up following me around, and they’d be like, ‘Where are you going?’ Then they’d be mad about it, because they’d be just following me around.”
Psychologically, some women fall in love with men who remind them of their father. There are very few men on the planet who would be like Clea’s father. It was a lose-lose situation for any man, because who can match up to Paul Newman?
“Oh, I don’t know! My husband is pretty close!” laughs Clea. “He is from Easton, Connecticut. He is very smart and very fair.”
What did Kurt have that all the other guys didn’t have?
“I think it was a little bit of a perfect storm. We were both older. We were both ready to settle down and luckily we met each other; it could have been ships that passed in the night. He actually was my room mate’s boss. My room mate wanted to set me up with him. I owned my own house and I travel a lot with the horses and I travel a lot for work. So I was never in my house very long and I have two dogs.
“I didn’t want my house to be empty all the time. Then a girlfriend of mine got engaged, and moved out of her apartment; we ran into each other at the market and I said, ‘Come stay at my house’!” She ended up staying at Clea’s for eight years. “It was actually great for both of us. We became amazing friends.” Though not, it transpired, as amazing as Clea and her room-mate’s boss. What happened? “She invited him to a party. We were immediately attracted to each other. He is tall and handsome and really smart and sensitive. He is a big Swede. He is from Sweden but is from America. Swedish and German.”
I tell Clea that she looks so Swedish that she could have been in ABBA. “It’s funny,” she laughs, “because I took him to Stockholm for his 40th birthday. He had never been. And we walked around Stockholm. Everybody thought we were Swedish and spoke to us in Swedish the whole time. We were all nodding and smiling!” she laughs. Clea and I share some memories over the character of The Swedish Chef in The Muppet Show before she adds that: “Kurt is a good guy. He is the CEO of Safe Water Network, which is another organisation which my father founded five or six years before he passed away.
“My father walked me down the aisle,” Clea says, before she shows me a picture on her phone of the father with a wild beard for a film part walking her down the aisle in 2003 (I, in turn, show Clea a picture on my phone of her dad with me
standing in front of his red sports car in Mondello Park race track in 2004 after an interview over lunch he gave me.) What did her father think of Kurt? “He loved him. Loved him. So, that was a huge selling point. Both my parents loved him. Most importantly, my mother adored him, but my father did too. And my sisters.”
What do Clea and her tall, incredibly handsome husband fight over? The hair drier?
“No — we don’t fight over the hair drier! He is the lowest maintenance person I have ever met. I have never seen anyone take a faster shower. He can be in and out of the shower — I don’t know how he does it. He can be in the shower and be out the door in like six minutes; and make coffee!” So, what do they fight about? “We fight about normal things that everyone fights about like ‘Don’t spend too much money on shopping’,
Sitting in the Westbury Hotel last weekend, Clea is just off the plane from America. “Jet-lagged,” she is nonetheless full of the joie de vivre you would expect from a sundance kid who was raised on a farm under the watchful adoring eyes of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman.
Clea, who has horse-jumped all her life, describes horses as “definitely an addiction for me. It is my happy place.” (One of the lows of her life, she says, was not competing at the Olympics.) She shows me pictures on her phone of her horse riding. Asked what makes her angry, the country girl rattles out the word, “Traffic!”; she laughs so loud that the people at the opposite table look around to perhaps wonder who this beautiful blonde woman hooting with delight is.
“I am psychopathic about traffic! That’s pretty much why I live in Connecticut. Driving in and out of New York city really makes my hair stand straight up!” Still, it was only after working a year at a law practice in New York that Clea ended up getting involved in her dad’s charities. “I actually thought I was going to become a lawyer,” says Clea.“I really wanted to be a lawyer and I wanted to do good for others and I wanted to protect people. I worked for a law firm in New York for a year, until I realised that I wasn’t tough enough and mean enough to do that job. And so when I came home I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, I had graduated from university and all that, and my father said to me: ‘Would you like to help out at the camps?’” Clea says, adds that both her parents had an immense, innate even, charitable side. “My mother thought that they were very lucky and that part of being a good person in the community was giving back and helping people that are not as lucky as you. And I think everyone in my family feels that way.
“There is a lot of hard stuff going on in the world. You find your passion, whatever it is, whether it is global warming or seriously ill children, or animals or the homeless, put your time and energy into it.
“Find out what makes you want to give back to others. For me, it really fulfils me as a person. If I didn’t have the camps and Barretstown and been able to give back to kids and families that really need it, I’m sure that I’d feel kind of lost almost.”
Is there ever a day when she doesn’t think about her father? Clea’s beautiful eyes — which she inherited from her famous father — seem sad for a millisecond before she answers.
“God, no. I miss my father, horribly. But I will say that, because I am an ambassador to all these camps, and because he was so passionate about these kids, it allows me to feel closer to him.”