Friday column: An utter absence of ‘poshlost’

Paul Newman always made me feel better about the world by the simple fact that he was in it.

Not that the actor and athlete, who died Saturday at 83, was a saint.

As a young man, Newman was arrested for running a red light, driving into a bush and leaving the scene of an accident. As a second-string football player at a tiny Ohio college, his drinking, a barroom brawl and a stint in jail got him kicked off the team. He began his relationship with Joanne Woodward while he was still married to his first wife, who was caring for their three children.

Yet there was something about Newman that always made me think of the best of us.

Part of it was the hard work he put in at the craft of acting — it was a joy watching him perform — and he put in the same hard work when he learned to be a fine race-car driver.

Part of it was courage — and not just in his willingness to take on challenging roles and play against type. It says something about the man that in his 80s he was still racing, and that after escaping from a car fire in 2005 he quickly entered another race.

Part of it was his humanitarian instinct. When he started his food company, Newman’s Own, on a lark, he decided on impulse to give the profits away, and in 25 years the firm has donated $250 million to charity.

Part of it was a refusal to take his fame seriously. His motto for Newman’s Own, for instance, was “Shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good.”

Part of it was his humor. Lynn Smith in the Los Angeles Times wrote that in 1963 when Newman’s first film — a dreadful biblical flick titled The Silver Chalice — aired on TV for a week, Newman took out a black-bordered ad in the Times that said, “Paul Newman apologizes every night this week.”

Part of it was his clear devotion to Woodward, to whom he was married for 50 years.

Part of it you could call his utter absence of poshlost.

Poshlost is a Russian word that’s been translated as “self-aggrandizing banality” and would seem to describe a lot of what we see today from actor-celebrities as well as athlete-celebrities.

I never saw it in Newman, who, Smith wrote, disliked what he called “noisy philanthropy” and once refused a national medal offered by President Clinton, “calling such recognition ‘honorrhea.’ ”

Like many in the film industry, Newman was political — he found his inclusion on Nixon’s enemies list particularly gratifying — but his friends, Smith reported, said he argued politics genially.

In 1971, Newman told a writer, “I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried — tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn’t complacent, who doesn’t cop out.”

I’d say he got his wish.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.