World has lost source of real cool

The world got a lot less cool this week, and it had nothing to do with global warming.

Paul Newman died.

The actor succumbed to lung cancer last Friday, at 83. And since it's been several years since he made his last decent movie — "Nobody's Fool" in 1994, when he played an aging cool guy — it's hard to put into modern perspective how nobody played cool like the King of Cool.

Think 20 Zac Efrons. Think 30 Leonardo DiCaprios.

As cool as Redford was, as cool as George Clooney is, it would take both of them, on their best days, to equal one Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke."

Newman was nominated seven times as Best Actor and won just once, probably because it never looked like he was acting. Probably because he wasn't acting. He could even make uncool look cool, as when he played the victim in "The Verdict," one of the best legal movies ever made, and "Absence of Malice," the best movie about journalism, period.

With one signature line in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" — "Who are those guys?" — he turned a thieving, murdering Butch Cassidy into history's most likable outlaw.

---

I met him once. Actually, that's stretching it. I saw him once. In 1974 my beat was the Salt Flats, and I was sent to cover a team of four race-car drivers who were coming to the Utah desert to set a number of world speed endurance records.

One of the drivers was Paul Newman.

He was at the height of his acting prime then. He'd made "The Sting" the year before — which won the 1973 Oscar for Best Movie. "Sometimes a Great Notion" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" had come out a couple of years earlier, and "Cool Hand Luke" and "Hombre" and "Hud" before that.

People who wouldn't have otherwise set foot on the Salt Flats with an engraved invitation from Mario Andretti flocked there disguised as racing enthusiasts.

Newman was just getting into his race-car driver phase at that point, and he made it clear with his body language that he had no intention of turning the event into a Hollywood fan party. He hid behind dark glasses and stayed close to his Ferrari.

I remember him throwing away an apple core and several women rushing to the garbage can to pull it out. It's as close as they got.