Categorical Aperitif

I hadn't realized that Paul Newman was on Nixon's enemies list. Nineteenth, no less.

He sometimes teamed with his wife and fellow Oscar winner, Joanne Woodward, with whom he had one of Hollywood's rare long-term marriages. ''I have steak at home, why go out for hamburger?'' Newman told Playboy magazine when asked if he was tempted to stray. They wed in 1958, around the same time they both appeared in ''The Long Hot Summer,'' and Newman directed her in several films, including ''Rachel, Rachel'' and ''The Glass Menagerie.''

With his strong, classically handsome face and piercing blue eyes, Newman was a heartthrob just as likely to play against his looks, becoming a favorite with critics for his convincing portrayals of rebels, tough guys and losers. ''I was always a character actor,'' he once said. ''I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.''

Newman had a soft spot for underdogs in real life, giving tens of millions to charities through his food company and setting up camps for severely ill children. Passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, and in favor of civil rights, he was so famously liberal that he ended up on President Nixon's ''enemies list,'' one of the actor's proudest achievements, he liked to say.

Indeed. Y'know, normally, I have to work a little to like unbearably gorgeous people, but Paul Newman—well, he was a whole other sort of creature, no?