Newman, known for those eyes, remembered for his heart

Nothing reveals more about Paul Newman than the time he suggested his own epitaph: "Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown."

Self-deprecating to a fault, the Hollywood icon never took himself or his celebrityhood seriously. Friday night, the 83-year-old actor, sex symbol, philanthropist, activist, family man and race car driver died after a long bout with cancer.

His eyes - those luminous orbs of blue effervescence - never turned brown.

Even though his eyes became his professional calling card, Newman maintained a love-hate relationship with them all his life. If they were a blessing, they were at best a superficial one. And Newman disdained superficiality.

"There's nothing that's designed to make somebody feel more like a piece of meat than some chick coming up and saying, 'Take off your dark glasses so we can see your baby blues,'" Newman told me during a 1982 interview in Boston.

"Am I supposed to look soulfully at them? Or do I give them just a peek, a flash? Really, it's such a ridiculous position to be put in. I said to one woman, 'Sure, lady. I'll take them off, if you'll let me inspect your gums!'"

Baby boomers grew up with Newman on the silver screen, playing enigmatic, multilayered characters and making it look all too easy.

His role as Robert Redford's outlaw cohort in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" is one of many Newman classics. (Redford said of his co-star, "He has the attention span of a bolt of lightning!")

Newman played the tough-guy convict in the Christ-metaphor-laden drama "Cool Hand Luke," a 1967 anti-establishment movie that coined Strother Martin's famous line, "What we have here ... is failure to communicate."

Newman earned 10 acting Academy Award nominations, but won the statuette only once, as the aging pool hustler "Fast Eddie" Felson in the Chicago-made "The Color of Money," Martin Scorsese's sequel to 1961's "The Hustler," also starring Newman.

Newman's films include "Sweet Bird of Youth," "Hud" (not to be confused with the Coen brothers' "The Hudsucker Proxy," also starring Newman), Alfred Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain," "The Sting" (winner of seven Oscars), "The Towering Inferno," the hockey drama "Slap Shot" and Pixar's animated "Cars" (he supplied the voice of Doc Hudson).

For younger audiences, Newman is probably better known as the funny face on all those "Newman's Own" grocery products, such as popcorn, spaghetti sauce and salad dressing. In 1982, the actor and his friend, writer A.E. Hotchner, started up the company in a basement almost as a joke.

Today, Newman's Own has earnings of about $250 million, all donated to charities, including the Scott Newman Foundation (named for Newman's only son, who died of a drug overdose in 1978), and the Hole-in-the-Wall camps, free facilities designed for seriously ill children.

"Once you've seen your face on a salad dressing bottle," Newman once quipped, "it's hard to take yourself seriously."

On the movie set, Newman was magnanimous to fellow actors, especially ones starting out. On the first day of filming "Fort Apache: the Bronx," the seasoned vet graciously asked Chicago actor Ken Wahl, a new kid on the acting block, out for lunch. Amazingly, Wahl had made earlier arrangements with friends and turned him down.

Newman was smart and articulate, but recognized that spontaneous speaking wasn't his strong suit.

During press junkets for his movies during the 1980s, the actor would enlist a colleague, usually a public relations person, to stand behind him when answering questions for journalists. Whenever Newman would drift from his point or begin to repeat himself, the colleague would subtlety poke the actor's shoulder; he would change topics or simply cease speaking.

Newman had no such help in 1983 when he went head-to-head in a televised political debate with his friend Charlton Heston, a civil rights activist and Democrat who suddenly swerved to the right, and would eventually wind up president of the National Rifle Association.

Heston and Newman, a fierce liberal, argued the merits of President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars defense system and nuclear proliferation. The extremely well-prepared Heston pretty much trounced his opponent, who appeared hesitant and unsure in the verbal jousting.

The friendship didn't survive. When Heston was scheduled to introduce Newman at an awards function, Newman requested that Heston be replaced by liberal actor Donald Sutherland.

Newman's upbringing hardly suggested the iconic Hollywood figure he would become.

He was born Jan. 26, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a highly successful sporting goods salesman. ("I wasn't driven to acing by an inner compulsion," Newman would later say, "I was running away from the sporting goods business!")

After making his mark on Broadway, young Newman had to overcome one of the worst first-movie choices in Hollywood history: a sword-and-sandals costume drama titled "The Silver Chalice." He was so appalled by the movie, he took out a large ad in Variety apologizing to readers for making it.

Fortunately, director Robert Wise cast Newman as the lead character, boxer Rocky Graziano, in the 1956 critical hit "Somebody Up There Likes Me." But it wasn't until two years later that Newman had his first bona fide commercial success, starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in a highly sanitized version of Tennessee Williams' classic play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

In 1969, a movie came along that was to change the actor's life. "Winning" cast him as a race car driver, and the experience spilled over into private life when he took up the sport and created his own racing company, now known as Newman/Hass/Lanigan Racing in Lincolnshire. At a time when most men pack it in for retirement, Newman was fulfilling a young man's dream.

Newman married his wife of more than 50 years, actress Joanne Woodward, in 1958 after divorcing his first wife, actress Jacqueline Witte. Besides his son Scott, Newman has five daughters, who released a statement Saturday following the death of their famous father.

They said he was "a rare symbol of selfless humility, the last to acknowledge what he was doing was special. Intensely private, he quietly succeeded beyond measure in impacting the lives of so many with his generosity. Always and to the end, Dad was incredibly grateful for his good fortune."

An anonymous blogger on a Web site probably said it best back in June after the first reports of Newman's cancer surfaced, and were dismissed by his agent.

"He's the kind of person that should live forever on earth for all the charity work he's done," the blogger wrote. "He needed to make it a better place. It's nice to see someone of his status care beyond himself. He's one in a billion."

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