Somebody up there's really lucky

Mavericks abound. John McCain. James Garner. The jumpsuit Tom Cruise wore in "Top Gun." But Paul Newman was the sort of maverick who didn't have to advertise. H was bold enough to defy the law and deny Elizabeth Taylor. Newman died Friday of cancer. Even when he was bad, he was good. By extension, even when the movies were bad, he was good, too. Being simultaneously beautiful, masculine, and charismatic (deeply so) had a way of disarming an audience: It didn't matter where he did it, as long he was doing it.

A Paul Newman performance - great or not - was an easy seduction. His mouth, nose, and oceanic blue eyes were perfectly arranged, as if by a genetic neat freak. The result was something I know I've seen chiseled in marble. His beauty was vaguely Graeco-Roman, the sort of face we've been trained to stare at and study. But Newman's on-screen struggles with drinking, forbidden lust, and remorse brought him the littlest bit closer to everybody else. You could identify with the men he played, despite it being tough to ignore how handsome he was. And he knew it.

Newman might have been the greatest swaggering movie star of all time. He could electrify a door frame just by leaning against. Even on crutches he could take your breath away. Right up to the end of the 1960s, Newman was acting with sexual intent - women wanted him and went crazy when they couldn't have him all. Taylor wasn't the best Maggie the Cat, but the casting in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" was ingenious. Maggie's fevered determination to capture Brick's undivided attention (and carry his child) were melodramatic but understandable. If she couldn't do it...

Newman was trained at the Actors Studio, New York's legendary thespian academy, and along with Brando, who also studied there, Newman was part of that class of male stars who brought great emotional realism to their work. They weren't reared in the Hollywood hothouse. They were shaped by theory and psychology. They were transitional figures between acting eras, the pivot from the Cary Grants to the Al Pacinos: gorgeous men whose good looks often belied inner turmoil. Newman's characters were always vulnerable to themselves - their arrogance, their pride, their sense of morality. He and Brando also brought natural physicality to the movies that was new for men. Their bodies were a kind of prop, too.The way they looked in a shirt or out of one told a story. It also was audience bait.

At the moment, there are a lot of actors who have some of what Newman had - the face, the swagger, the virility. Most lack the sex and the charisma. Nearly all of them lack the self-belief to fill out a part until the role and the man in it become iconic. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon are still underrated actors, but both sometimes seem to be fighting the grip of a lingering adolescence. No matter how good they are, they don't ever seem entirely grown up. That was never a problem for Newman. He came to us fully developed. Matthew McConaughey showed up 12 years ago advertised as the second coming of Paul Newman, but as an actor I'm not sure he's fully arrived. Now stardom is purely what actors do off screen. As my mother likes to tell me whenever she can, stars just aren't what they used to be. A Paul Newman comes along once, and that's it - actor, champion race car driver, philanthropic face of salad dressing, popcorn, and tomato sauce.

It was that face that shook up my life. When I was a sophomore in college, I applied to be a summer counselor at Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, which gives kids with serious illnesses a break from their medical hassles. I went out for an interview and visited the camp before the new session started. I didn't get the job. I guess I wasn't much of camper, which I knew. But my heart broke anyway. That job was the only thing I had lined up for that summer. The camp wasn't terribly far from my campus. And Newman was someone whose generosity was sincerely inspiring chiefly because he made bringing joy to others seem like the most natural thing a person could do, more than act. (He was a star. He was selfless.) Plus, after Sidney Poitier and Al Pacino, he was also my mother's favorite actor, and not being picked to work for him felt like I'd let her down. It took almost a year for me to be able to watch a Newman movie, without sadness tainting the experience. In a purely job-oriented way I knew how Maggie the Cat felt.

I spent that summer working as an usher at an art house in Philadelphia, and I had a lot of time to figure out what else I might want to do with my life. I never got to thank Newman for that. I guess I just did.