Eddie’s post on the death of actor/philanthropist Paul Newman reminds me of my small brush with the legendary movie star. I push started his car for him — or tried to, anyway.

At the time, I was a bureau chief for a newspaper in Connecticut.  The office I was in charge of was in Westport, Conn., where Mr. Newman lived with his wife Joanne Woodward for many years.

Westport is a beautiful hybrid of Manhattan glamour and old New England charm, ground zero in a region that’s absolutely infested with celebrities. Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas live there, as does Martha Stewart. Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has a house in neighboring Weston. The singer Meat Loaf coached his daughter’s softball team in nearby Redding. 

My newspaper bureau was in a shopping center on the Post Road. One of the other tenants was Newman’s Own, which sells salad dressing, popcorn and other food products to fund the Hole In The Wall Gang camp. That’s a charity established by Mr. Newman for seriously ill children.

One particular Friday afternoon, I heard a colleague calling from our back step. ”Don’t do that. You’re going to hurt yourself. Wait a minute. We’ll help you.”

The back door to our office faced a large, steeply slopped parking lot. As I got outside, I noticed a middle aged man wearing cowboy boots and a soft leather jacket, standing up against the front bumper of a very big SUV.  He was just tall enough to see over the hood. He was throwing all his weight into the bumper, trying to push the truck backward and uphill. It looked like, at any moment, the big truck would roll forward and crush him.

As we arrived, he glanced back over his shoulder sheepishly. “I left my lights on,” he said. As soon as I saw those blue eyes peering over the top of his sunglasses, I knew he was Paul Newman. And he was very embarrassed.

He jumped into the cab, while two other reporters and I pushed the truck backward out of its parking space until it was facing downhill. We told him we’d give him a running start, figuring he could pop the clutch when he was moving fast enough and, presto, the engine would roar to life. He was pessimistic.

Mr. Newman was then at the height of his auto racing days. The truck was powered by an experimental high compression Nissan engine – he only drove Nissans on the track — and he didn’t think we could get it going fast enough to push start it. But we were three men, young and strong. We’d show him.

Turns out he was right. We must have gotten that thing up to 20 miles per hour, but each time he popped the clutch it just sputtered to a halt. We’d have to call a tow truck. He asked us to phone a local garage that specialized in exotic imports. Make sure you ask for the owner, he said.

The owner was busy. I told him that he probably wanted to send a truck now, because this was for one of his regular customers. Sorry, he said, we can’t come.

You don’t understand, I pressed. This is for Paul Newman. “Have you tried Triple A,” he offered helpfully before hanging up. Someone had probably tried that line on him before. Sorry, I told Paul Newman. But if he wanted a tow truck from that garage, he was going to have to call himself.

If he was embarrassed before, he was probably mortified to walk into our messy office and realize we were newspaper reporters. I sure he’d resigned himself to reading an account of his misfortune in the following day’s paper (he didn’t — this is the first time I’ve ever told the story publicly, except to a few friends around the time it happened. If my old editor is reading this, all I can say is that I’m sorry, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time).

A few minutes later, we were back out in the parking lot waiting for the tow truck, Fast Eddie Felson and I. As a writer, I knew I’d have something funny or clever to say. Trouble was, as I stood there looking at him, I couldn’t imagine what it was.

I watched as he climbed onto the front bumper to open the hood, and nodded knowingly as he showed me the engine modifications. “Do you like it,” I asked. “It’s kind of hard to push start,” he replied dryly, never talking his eyes off the engine.

My mind went blank, I couldn’t think of another thing. But as my colleagues will attest, that has never stopped me before. I kept talking.

“I just saw Cool Hand Luke,”  I said.

 He stopped and looked up quizzically. “On TV. The other night. On channel 11, WPIX. It was a good movie. You were really good.”

He took off his sunglasses and fixed me with a whithering stare, his ice blue eyes (yeah, they really were that blue) sparkling in the late afternoon sun . Thankfully, I stopped talking before I launched into my Strother Martin impersonation (”What we have here is a failure to communicate.”)

The longer he stared, the dumber I felt. The dumber I felt, the more I twitched and strained like a fish on a hook. Finally, he spoke.

“I’m going to wait inside the truck,” he said. “You go down to the road and flag down the tow truck when it arrives. Make sure he gets all the way back here.”

“Sure thing, Paul. Ah, Mr. Newman. I’ll get right on it.” 

Don’t remember that he ever thanked me. He really didn’t have to. That’s the kind of relationship we had. I’m sure he could tell, without a word from me, that I considered him a great actor and humanitarian.

I’m pretty sure I knew what he thought of me, too. But I’ve never held it against him.