Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good: The Madcap Business Adventure by the Truly Oddest Couple by Paul Newman & A. E. Hotchner

Author:Paul Newman & A. E. Hotchner [Newman, Paul & Hotchner, A. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Management, Entrepreneurship, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780385511599
Google: Unvdt2YXt4AC
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-11-04T00:21:33.462524+00:00

“The first time I met with Paul and Hotch,” Tom Beeby says, “it was at the Newman’s Own office, the office furnished with Paul’s old lawn furniture, and a Ping-Pong table with personalized paddles. Hilarious signs on the walls. It was great stuff. Once I saw that, the notion of what might be possible dawned on me, that this was not an ordinary client. These were a couple of guys who were willing to take risks, had a great sense of humor, and were willing to try anything. So that opened up the idea that we could do something really special. Before that, I had the expectation of a normal job. But once I realized how free they were of ordinary conventions, then I realized we could expand what we might be able to do there.

“From the very beginning, Paul wanted to create a semblance of the western town of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. So I was trying to sort through that as an architectural idea, which seemed like a curious concept for a Connecticut site. In addition to my position at Yale, I have an architectural firm in Chicago, and I was working on this with some of my key people.”

Beeby’s initial scheme was like a traditional camp, with a main building in the town center. Our reaction wasn’t good. We told him it was too institutional. Paul made it clear that we wanted something that was extremely unarchitectural, something capricious and freewheeling and not in any way orthodox or doctrinaire. So the architects went back to their drawing boards to create a town, with the town center where the major buildings were, with the cabins as a kind of settlement around it. The dining hall would look like a public gathering space but have an overlay of being a Shaker barn. The administration building looked like the town hall, it had columns and a pediment, and it was a classical temple, so it would be the center of power, with stores running down the street. And each one had a symbolic sign that signified what craft went on inside. The gym became the livery stable with bark columns on it.

“Paul’s architectural theory,” Beeby says, “was that whenever you got to the point where you’d make something more the same or more different, always make it more different. Both of them were against any kind of regimentation or anything that had to do with institutionalization. So we created this overtone of a very lighthearted, fun place, with a kind of dream world aspect to it. This town was a fantasy place where kids would go and forget their past, forget their current medical problems. That evolved as the major theme of the camp, and the look was rather cinematic. Everyone was very candid. They said what they thought. Paul and Hotch would balance these things and in the end make a decision on it. So it moved very rapidly. It was not a normal building process where you mulled over these things forever, because there was no structure at that point to the camp.

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