Did Paul Newman really roll a keg down a hill, hit the dean's car and get expelled from college?
The investigation no one asked for
Legendary screen actor but more importantly onetime Ohio University student Paul Newman, and his wife Joanne Woodward, are in the news. Their daughter, Melissa Newman, just published a coffee table book paying tribute to her parents' relationship. I've been wanting to write about Paul Newman's time at my alma mater for a while because it's a colorful part of Ohio University lore. No time like the present.
The legend of Paul Newman and the keg and the hill and the dean
Any good Bobcat can rattle off the names of the school's most famous students. (Not necessarily graduates, ahem.) The list includes but is not limited to: Arsenio Hall, Nancy Cartwright, Matt Lauer, Mike Schmidt, Clarence Page, Richard Dean Anderson, Ed O'Neill, Roger Ailes, and Paul Newman. And more recently: Piper Perabo and Logan Paul. Newman is, by far, the most famous of them all.
When I was at OU, you couldn't mention Newman's name without adding, “They say he rolled a keg down Jeff Hill, and it hit the dean's car, and they kicked him out of school.” Jeff Hill, for you non-Bobcats, is a hill, not an unfortunate person named Jeff.
I heard this story for the first time before the internet, which means it had been handed down word of mouth for decades. It's still repeated today. And you can find it on some websites, although never with a source, just sort of accepted as fact. But – and this is the question before us – is it true? Did the man who claimed to have graduated from college “Magna Cum Lager” really keg the dean's car?
What his memoir says
We can't ask Newman because, RIP, he died in 2008. So I turned to his memoir, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man.” This book was based on transcripts of interviews he gave to writer Stewart Stern in the 1980s and was published two years ago. There are several mentions of Ohio University. I wish I could say Athens played a major role in shaping him. But like many celebrities who attended OU, it was more a fling than a long-term relationship. OU is mentioned a few times.
Newman grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the son of a successful sporting goods store owner. He never says why he chose OU over other colleges. There is a photo in the book of Newman and his mother on campus. He looks happy.
The reason he went to college is because it was WWII, and he knew he'd end up in the military. By going to college, he'd have some options when he served. He enlisted while at OU and attended class in the spring of 1943, hoping to become a pilot, but he never did so because he was color-blind and struggled with some of the high-level thinking demanded of pilots.
From the book: “So my choice was to continue my officer enlistment protocols or withdraw and head back to Ohio U and wait for my draft number to come up. But, I thought, to what end? I'd enjoyed the drama classes I tried in my first semester, but Ohio U was really nothing but a lot of beer drinking and dating. The only thing that distinguished me there was I was a great chug-a-lugger.”
Yes, he used the words chug-a-lugger, and frankly, I think we should all use the words chug-a-lugger.
Newman did go off to officer school, and he served in the Navy during WWII in the Pacific. In all, he spent just the one semester in Athens.
After the war, Newman bypassed OU and enrolled at Kenyon. From his telling: “The incredibly stupid mistake I made after the war, having not been shot down in the Pacific, was signing up for a non-coed college like Kenyon.” That quote is obviously not on any Kenyon brochures – the cowards. Newman said the girls at OU were distracting, a fact confirmed by subsequent generations of chug-a-luggers.
Kegs galore
Back in 1946, it may shock you to learn Kenyon was, according to Newman, a “party school.” Basically, whenever Newman tells a memorable story about Kenyon, there is a keg. (Turn your phone sideways to better read the text.)
I miss how poetically Americans used to write. “Prone to getting out of hand on long tiring evenings.” I challenge you to find a nicer way of saying the man liked getting housed.
At Kenyon, Newman and his teammates on the football team got into a fight at a bar, an incident that ultimately led to a player punching a police officer and everyone spending the night in jail. A keg makes an appearance in that story.
It was this brawl that pushed him in the direction of acting. Newman was put on probation and kicked off the football team.
Another story that involved a keg at Kenyon was Newman's student laundry business.
Newman was, by his own admission, a big drinker. Later in life, he admitted it was a problem and took steps to curb those “long tiring evenings.”
As I researched this piece, my initial theory was this: As one of the school's most famous alumni, perhaps Kenyon is where our keg legend took hold as a game of telephone played itself out on Ohio campuses across the decades. Ohio University? An Ohio university? Kegs galore. Trouble. Maybe?
The memoir was edited by David Rosenthal at Penguin. I sent his employer an email asking for him to contact me. I'd like to know if any of the transcripts Rosenthal used to write the book mentioned rolling a keg of beer into the dean's car. Given how many colorful details are shared in this memoir, I'd be shocked if Newman told that story and it was not included in the book. My attempts to reach Rosenthal have been unsuccessful.
Newman returns to OU and nary a keg is mentioned
In 1968, Newman returned to campus to campaign for Eugene McCarthy for president. As far as I can tell, it's the only time he went back. He was mobbed by students. An established star, he was fresh off the success of Cool Hand Luke, probably his most iconic role. Former Post journalist Ken Steinhoff has a good write-up and great photos on his website. Steinhoff dutifully mentions the keg legend and adds that in Newman's remarks that day, kegs and hills and deans never came up.
The official record
OU archivist Bill Kimok tells me there is no disciplinary evidence or any evidence at all that the Newman myths ever took place. “I put those never confirmed whoppers in the category of the ghosts, legends, and folklore collection which has commonly been known as 'the spook file,' which we hold in our public reference collection,” he said.
Kimok added: “It is no surprise that people make this stuff up. It was reported to me that after Ohio Today published Newman's obit, including his one semester of attendance at OU, that a few women wrote in complaining that his official transcripts must be mistaken because they had dated him and they were not here during his time at OU.”
Sorry, grandma, that wasn't really Paul Newman you were necking with on College Green.
The Post
Recalling that The Post has been digitized, I checked the OU archives. There were lots of humorous mentions about Newman legends through the years – including one by me that I'd forgotten I'd written. Then – amazingly – I found something that looked solid.
In the Oct. 4, 1994, edition of The Post, a T-com major wrote a guest column for the editorial page about the summer she spent working at The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, Newman's camp for terminally ill children. (Newman did a lot of great charity work, which lives on today with this Newman's Own brand.) Did our guest columnist ask Paul Newman about rolling a keg down Jeff Hill? Darn right she did. Here’s the end of the column:
The author of the column, Tara Iarusso, said he told her his enlistment in the service was the reason he didn’t return to school, which tracks with what was written in the memoir. As for any wayward kegs, he was a bit cagier. “He was more like ‘that’s a better story’ when I told him about Jeff Hill. He seemed tickled about the stories,” Iarusso said.
'Keg and Hill'
Finally, I contacted Paul Newman's daughter Melissa Newman by email. She's the one who wrote the book that just came out. I figured – maybe it's a story he told his kids, or maybe it’s a story he told while his kids were around. Worth a shot. I congratulated Melissa on publishing (her book is available here) and asked her about the legend.
To my delight, she responded.
“I vaguely remember the story ... yes. Keg and Hill … If I ever find anything out I'll track you down!” she wrote.
I asked her to pass along any more information she could gather.
And that's where we left it.
Hey, it's not a total denial. It's not no.
Unfortunately, it's not confirmation either.
But it does leave the door cracked open a tiny bit.
For a tumbling keg to smash into.
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Great stuff. One story I can confirm involves Newman’s brief time as a member of Phi Kappa Tau at OU.
Newman, as Adam Sandler famously sang, was half-Jewish. The fraternity members wanted to invite Newman to pledge, but had never had a Jewish member before, and weren’t sure if the national organization was “restricted” to Christian men. So they wrote the home office, which advised the chapter that any man of good character was welcome.
Years later, that correspondence was found at the fraternity headquarters, leading to speculation that Newman May have been the national fraternity’s first Jewish member.
I lived at the bottom of Jeff Hill and don't remember ever hearing that story.
I'm enjoying the OU nostalgia and investigation!