The elaborate prank Robert Redford pulled on Paul Newman: “I started to get bored”
Long before George Clooney and Brad Pitt took great joy in making each other’s lives miserable by relentlessly pranking each other, the equally handsome and debonair Robert Redford and Paul Newman did the very same thing. After becoming real-life neighbours between shooting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, the iconic stars began a friendship that would last a lifetime. They were different in many ways, but also shared a lot in common, such as a keenly silly sense of humour.
In truth, Redford and Newman’s real-life friendship is almost as beloved by their fans as any of the movies they made together. There is something charming and relatable about two guys who shared such a strong bond off-screen that they were always there for each other throughout their lives, whether the other guy needed help with a role, or either of them just needed to chat about how they saw the world.
Indeed, their friendship endured a lot longer than their screen partnership, which only amounted to the two aforementioned classics. They didn’t feel the need to pursue a third collaboration for commercial reasons, turning down several opportunities to get the band back together that they deemed “corny and kind of low grade.” Instead, they focused on the important things in life, like concocting elaborate pranks on each other that neither man would ever mention afterwards. “That would diminish it,” Redford once explained. “No. The idea was you just never acknowledged it.”
Somehow, both men were able to stick to this credo when Redford pulled his biggest prank on Newman, which soon turned into a back-and-forth battle for supremacy. At one point in their friendship, Newman became so obsessed with racing cars – something that Redford claims he introduced his pal to while shooting Butch Cassidy – that it began to grate on the All the President’s Men star. “I started to get bored, because every time we got together, all he talked about was racing and cars,” Redford told the John F Kennedy Museum in 2014. He liked that his friend took racing seriously and was a dedicated car aficionado; he just didn’t need to hear about it every five minutes.
So, Redford put in motion a plan to take his friend down a peg or two. “For his 50th birthday, we were both living in Connecticut, so I decided to play a joke on him,” Redford remembered. “I called a towing service and said, ‘Do you have any crushed automobiles? Do you have a Porsche?’ They said, ‘It’s funny you should mention that. We had a car fall off a track and land on a Porsche and crush it'”.
This was music to Redford’s ears, so he told the service to wrap the crushed Porsche in paper, complete with a red ribbon, before delivering it to Newman’s back porch as a gift. Redford waited a while, then called the service to ask if they’d done what he asked. They said they had, but Redford didn’t hear a word from Newman, so he knew he was sticking to their “You don’t talk about the pranks” philosophy. However, little did he know that Newman was already planning his retaliation.
“A couple of weeks later, I went into my rented house in Westport, Connecticut,” Redford explained. “In the foyer was this…big wooden box. And it took me about an hour-and-a-half to crowbar it open. And inside was…a big square block of metal.” To his delight, he realised Newman had ordered the crushed Porsche to be compacted, and delivered right back to him.
Never one to allow Newman to have the last word, Redford immediately came up with a new plan. He hired a sculptor friend to turn the compacted vehicle into a bizarre metal garden ornament, and three weeks later, enlisted the towing service to deliver it to Newman’s house again. “I went over to see it and it was horrible,” Redford laughed. Once again, though, did Redford get any kind of rise out of Newman? Nope. “Neither Paul nor I ever spoke about it!” Redford confirmed.
