Paul, Paul, how I will miss you. From about the age of 8 or 9 he was my favorite movie star, by age 13 he was the love of my life, as I got older, he still held those designations but I added: great actor, admired political activist, philanthropist, family man and wonderful husband to Joanne. I hardly ever remember him speaking about her without praising her talent as an actress and speaking in admiring words about her as an accomplished woman; it was clear that he adored her and was secure enough to give her the spotlight. What a great loss. What a great and beautiful man both physically and spiritually. He leaves a wonderful legacy to the world, his art, his joy of life, the wonderful and generous gift of his philanthropy……….how he will be missed.

So very sad. Thank you for this tribute.

In honor of Paul Newman and the gift of himself that I was fortunate to receive, I am going to my local grocery store and stocking up on Salad Dressings, Spaghetti Sauces, Popcorn, candy bars and whatever else may have his likeness. I choose in these economic times to contribute to a man (and that is the operative word) who epitomized for me, the behavior and conduct of an citizen hero. He was a divine example of a 20th century American man. He was rugged, tender, boyish, roguish, masculine, engaged, curious, loyal, faithful, adventuresome, artistic, generous, courageous, flawed, and mostly, a grown-up. The adjective, “cool” has been used repeatedly this weekend to describe him. Nah. Paul Newman wasn’t cool. “Cool” is Hugh Hefner and a few of the Rat Pack boys. “Cool” is a school boy’s idea of being a man. Paul Newman was the real deal. Paul Newman was a real American Man. A man of great decency. I look around at this world I co-inhabit and am saddened because being decent is so “not cool.” Decency is lacking at the highest levels in government, finance, education, sports, entertainment, and common civility. And so, today I shall fix a tossed green, some pasta marinara and indulge a respite from health food by munching on popcorn while watching Paul Newman and his wife in a frivolous romantic comedy involving Paris fashion and sports writing. Today my vote is with my pocketbook. Mr. Newman, in my own small way, I gratefully give my money to the continuance of your Hole in The Wall Camp. Thank you from a movie fan.

I swear the best one was The Long, Hot Summer but you just don’t see that one mentioned as often as one of his greatest roles.

It was love at first sight for me and the more I learned about him the more I loved. It is going to be sad for me living in a world that I know he is no longer a part of but I am so thankful that he was here. And, I have the movies that I can watch forever. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid..Oh my! And, the soundtrack from that movie just makes my heart soar. I hate to say this but my first love looked so much like him (voted best looking in the senior class, too) and I can’t forget him, either. I think one thing that keeps me on track physically is knowing that I will probably see him one last time in a few years at our 50th high school class reunion……….smack you right in the face, Agy, but, there I’ve said it. RIP, Paul, you made a big difference.

The wonderful thing about Paul Newman was that he was so much more than a talented actor. The eyes, the smile, the memorable roles…all more than wonderful. But it was the fact that he invested his earnings to benefit others and didn’t seek the limelight for his work that made me love him. Every time a buy a Newman’s Own product or donate to the Hole in the Wall Gang, I’ll say a small thank you to Papa Newman for his continuous generosity.

My girl friend and I were both in love with him. That was our “crush.” In the business of acting, it’s hard to find a person who sees the world for what it is, and not as a reflection of his stardom. He was almost one of a kind. I never ceased to enjoy his movies. What an entertainer and what a great human being. As others have said, we still have his films. That, and his charitable heart will carry on for years to come.

Well if it wasn’t James Dean whom we all emulated back in the day, you know engineers boots, jeans, Red White Stag Jacket and white T, then it surely was Butch and Rocky and Luke and Hud and Fast Eddie and a few others and I wonder how may times that bedroom scene with Patricia Neal got played out in bedrooms all over the country—lord those blue eyes—he was a good man and a damned fine actor and a great father too—all girls except Scott and I feel Mr Neumann mourned him all the remaining days of his life—I’m sure I would have were he my son. And all those kids who went to Hole in the Wall camps and he’d come in and eat lunch with the kids while the staff flustered their way through their lunch. The good that man did made him shine in my eyes—yes sir it surely did.

“I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood. ” - Paul Newman

Business; Newman’s Own: Two Friends and a Canoe Paddle By JON GERTNER DRIVING along the back roads of Westport, Conn., in his 1961 red Corvette, slowly enough to reminisce, A.E. Hotchner would like to make it clear that it has not been easy putting up with Paul Newman since they both bought houses here in the 1950’s. To hear it from Mr. Hotchner — or Hotch, as everyone calls him — he has at times been pushed to the cusp of despair by Mr. Newman’s whims and high jinks, though the men are friends as well as business partners. ”Oh, I’m beyond complaining,” Mr. Hotchner says with a theatrical flourish. But he complains anyway. During the filming of ”The Verdict” and ”Harry and Son,” Mr. Hotchner recalls, Mr. Newman would phone from his trailer at every opportunity — sometimes to talk at stupefying length about salad dressing, or to ask Mr. Hotchner, the author of more than a dozen books, including the memoir ”Papa Hemingway,” to help chase down a special variety of mustard or popcorn. Or Mr. Newman would cook up a philanthropic idea and recruit Mr. Hotchner for some legwork. ”Oh, it was murder,” Mr. Hotchner recalls. ”Just murder. Calling me constantly. Oh.” He slows the car and pulls into a short driveway that leads to the modest but handsomely restored 18th-century red-shingled Colonial where Mr. Newman lives with his wife, Joanne Woodward. Mr. Hotchner walks along a stone path near a barn and down several steps that lead to an open door; inside, he points to a basement cluttered with a lawn tractor and tools. ”Well, here is where it was born,” he says. When business historians map some of the most curious and important marketing innovations of the 20th century, they may take note of this. On a winter’s day in 1980, the two friends came down here with a tub of Budweisers on ice and mixed an enormous vat of salad dressing. ”We didn’t have anything to stir it with,” Mr. Hotchner says, ”so Newman went to the river outside the barn and got his canoe paddle.” He was not pleased. ”Newman came back and started churning, and I said: ‘You’re out of your goddamned mind. That paddle isn’t sterile. Nothing is sterile.’ But he didn’t care. And, fortunately, after we gave it to the neighbors as gifts, no one died.” Some of these adventures are described in a book by Mr. Hotchner and Mr. Newman called ”Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good,” published this month by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. The book details their business and philanthropic successes over the past two decades. But it barely touches on how Newman’s Own, started as a joke, then run as a circus, and now in the hands of skilled executives, has recently become a mainstream fixture, procuring lucrative alliances with McDonald’s and Costco. The private company makes a line of foods including lemonade, popcorn, salad dressings and spaghetti sauce, and, as the labels say, all profits go to charity. The amount should reach $18 million this year; it adds up to some $150 million over the company’s 21-year history. Mr. Newman’s celebrity tends to obscure how revolutionary his company has been in forging a new kind of conscientious consumerism over the past decade. In that time, buyers have demonstrated a fierce brand loyalty that has fascinated many larger corporate players at the same time that it has eroded their market share. During the past few years, some marketing scholars have taken note of the phenomenon, leading them to research how Mr. Newman’s company and others in the food business have used philanthropy, ”cause marketing” and a message of corporate social responsibility to strategic advantage. To C.B. Bhattacharya, a marketing professor at Boston University who led a three-day conference in September on the topic, part of the answer is that consumers are increasingly looking for deep and meaningful relationships in what they buy. ”And the best companies,” he adds, ”like Newman’s Own, like Stonyfield Farm, like Patagonia, are ones that truly understand this kind of identification from the customer.” Mr. Newman does not disagree. But he has always contended that there was no plan, no grand design. Shortly after Mr. Hotchner arrives, he walks out to join him on a rickety, freestanding wood swing in the middle of his lawn. ”We did not have any idea,” he says of the company’s origins. ”We literally did not have any idea.” With a full gray beard and half-glasses perched on the end of his nose, he has the aura of a retired classics professor rather than a leading man. Though he is trim and robust, there is little trace of the matinee idol. Then again, Mr. Newman is 78. Mr. Hotchner is 83. ”The younger generation doesn’t buy the stuff because of me,” Mr. Newman says, rocking in the swing. ”They don’t even know me. I think they buy it because of the charity.” Newman’s Own regularly receives — and rebuffs — acquisition offers from larger companies, and it always raises profits by more than 10 percent annually. How big can the enterprise become? To Mr. Hotchner, the idea of watching Newman’s Own double in size over the next few years is particularly appealing. ”Think of what we could do with the money,” he says. Mr. Newman thinks this over, rocking harder on the creaking swing. ”I just want to be able to give away more than Dick Cheney got in tax relief,” he says. ”That’s what I want.” And after a slight dramatic pause, he and Mr. Hotchner burst out laughing. The offices of Newman’s Own are 10 minutes away, in a suite of rooms above a bank on the Post Road in downtown Westport. There is table tennis as well as a billiards table. Framed posters from Mr. Newman’s movies line the walls. The test kitchen is down the hall; although the company sells about $190 million in food every year, it has no oven. There’s one old stovetop with four electric burners. The company functions with just 18 employees. Virtually everything is sourced out to contractors, including manufacturing, procurement, shipping and quality control. But it is a different matter when it comes to taste. That is definitely not outsourced. Mr. Newman has an extremely finicky palate and can take as long as two years and endless rounds of sampling to approve something for production. He often rejects a product outright. In the early years, recipes sometimes came from Mr. Newman and Mr. Hotchner (the two collaborated on their spaghetti sauce) and once from Ms. Woodward (Newman’s Own Lemonade). These days, company executives think about what they want and then ask their network of suppliers to create a batch. The vodka sauce recently released by Newman’s Own is a good example, as is the new Thousand Island dressing that Mr. Newman himself suggested they rename Two Thousand Island dressing so that his brand would have more islands. After the batch is made, the employees gather around the sturdy table in the kitchen for a critique. The McDonald’s alliance, which merged Newman’s Own salad dressings with the restaurant company’s new line of salads, has been a boon for both since it started in the spring. McDonald’s attributed its first sales gain in more than a year to the demand for its new salads, and Tom Indoe, the chief operating officer of Newman’s Own, says the company has already noticed a rise in grocery-store sales of the dressings. Clearly, this fits into Mr. Indoe’s long- range plans. His research tells him that Newman’s Own is now in 14 percent of the nation’s households, and that a premium brand like the company’s could be in 35 percent. ”When I arrived here six years ago we had a 2.1 percent share of the salad dressing category,” he said. ”Right now we have a 5 percent share.” In a $1.4 billion category, that leaves much room for improvement. To listen to Mr. Indoe, it is easy to forget that he is running a philanthropic enterprise. But that fact is not lost on his business partners. The charitable glow of Newman’s Own, whose products also happen to include only natural ingredients, helps a multinational company like McDonald’s. Gary Hirshberg, the chief executive of Stonyfield Farm, a dairy company that aggressively publicizes its organic ingredients and social commitment (10 percent of all profits go to environmental causes) views the Newman’s Own-McDonald’s deal as tangible progress in the evolution of both big and small business. Mr. Hirshberg said he believed that the strategies of companies with social goals need to be subversive. He compared the underestimated power of brands like Newman’s Own or Stonyfield — which in 2001 sold a 40 percent minority stake to Group Danone, the makers of Danon yogurt — to the rise of the presidential candidate Howard Dean. By Mr. Hirshberg’s reckoning, the fact that American consumers want to ease their conscience or repair the world when they buy things helps the feisty companies in the guerrilla war to do business and do good, whether they are teamed up with a big partner or operating on their own. Back in the swing on his lawn, Mr. Newman agrees. ”If you can make people aware that things are going to charity, and if there are two competing products on the shelf, maybe people will grab the one where some good will actually come of it,” he says. Mr. Newman’s charitable impulses are not expressed solely through the company. That evening, he and Ms. Woodward would be co-hosts of a charity auction at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Old Greenwich to raise money for the reconstruction of the Westport Country Playhouse, where Ms. Woodward is the artistic director. At the auction, the two stars make their entrance before a pack of photographers. Mr. Hotchner arrives later and immediately announces that he is ready for a gin and tonic. He takes a look around and pronounces the crowd ”the other side of Westport, the money side, the WASP-y side. I don’t know anyone here.” Just then, a woman runs up to give him a bear hug. It is Martha Stewart, who, as a caterer in Westport years ago, organized a successful taste testing for Newman’s Own salad dressing before it went on the market. The founders credit her with a pivotal role in giving them the confidence to go forward. They chat for a few minutes and make tentative plans for dinner. Perhaps, Ms. Stewart tells him, she could have the two men on her television show to talk about their book and their business. When Mr. Hotchner and Mr. Newman speak publicly about why Newman’s Own succeeded, they usually cite quality, celebrity and philanthropy, generally in that order. But there is also an ever-present shtick that dates back to their original media appearances of two decades ago, the same shtick that appears on their cheeky packaging labels. It’s also present in the jibes the men trade. They bicker. Mr. Hotchner insults Mr. Newman. Mr. Newman insults Mr. Hotchner. When Mr. Newman, rocking pleasantly in the yard swing, says he never thought the first salad-dressing introduction would lose any money, Mr. Hotchner remarks, ”You always had a kind of arrogance about this.” And when Mr. Hotchner explains that he worried about how much they could lose at the start, when a $40,000 investment was required, Mr. Newman assumes a look of surprise and says: ”What do you mean, ‘our’ money? It was my money.” LATE in the afternoon, when Mr. Hotchner is behind the wheel of his Corvette, on the way back from Mr. Newman’s house, he gives his friend’s cooking scant praise. ”He’s good with salads, good with an omelet, basic things,” Mr. Hotchner says. The reason their company works is not that Mr. Newman is a genius in the kitchen, he adds. It’s that Mr. Newman is very good at knowing what he likes. But he leaves something out. ”If anything happened to me where I needed to go to someone, he’s the one I would go to,” Mr. Hotchner says that evening in the hotel ballroom. ”And if anything happened to him,” he adds, ”I would think he’d come to me.” When Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward renewed their vows recently, Mr. Hotchner was one of the few people Mr. Newman invited who was outside the family. And, over the years, whenever the confusion of running the company or starting a free camp for terminally ill children — the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Conn. — seemed daunting or unworkable to one of them, the other became the motivator. ”The friendship was the whole key,” Mr. Hotchner says. ”It would have never happened without it. He’s as good a friend as I’ve got.”

Whoopie:) I watch “TheView” with my “nitro” close by, I am sure many of you understand why here… I have try to find a place to email to “TheView” but, did not find it. (I am half blind also, maybe its the reason why) Whoopie I know what you think about Ms Palin but..when I watch TheView, its another “ballgame” altogether. Please explain to me why you all “cave in” to Elizabeth…when it gets a little interesting like yesterday wednesday October 1st. (many many other times also when the show start after the commercial we then … listen to your dentist story, which was nice but….at the same time the story never developed As a moderator I understand Whoopie you have to do just that ..moderate but..at the same time she always has the upper hand. Is this in your contract that you cant upset Elizabeth too much? It seems like it in many occasions. Its unfair…. Thank you for reading me… I want to say how I am impress by your website and all those bright women who writes in. Its one of the best for women. ACanadianFriend Pupe :) ps: please excuse mistakes my mother tongue is french

With each passing of many of the older stars, I have felt a mixture of sadness and nostalgia, but with Paul’s passing I cried, he was a man among so few. He will be remembered for his blue eyes, but his soul was what spoke to everyone.

I read many of the comments about Paul Newman,I have no better words to add,it’s all been said beautifully by your readers and I agree with it all,he was a great actor and an even greater man with his charitable gifts to the less fortunate,especially to the children!!! He will be missed by everyone!!!!