The Daily Feather — The Sting of Losing a Hollywood Great

What Robert Redford and Paul Newman shared went beyond friendship – they had a special bond. Both loved racing cars and playing pranks on each other that they didn’t talk about afterwards. In 2014, Redford recalled his best one: “For his 50th birthday… I decided to play a joke on him. I called a towing service and said, ‘Do you have a Porsche?… I want to wrap that in paper and put a ribbon around it.… and would you deliver this to Paul Newman’s house and put it on his back porch?… A couple weeks later I went into my rented house in Westport, Connecticut. In the foyer was this big wooden box…it took me about an hour-and-a-half to crowbar it open…inside was this big square block of metal.’” [Newman had the Porche compacted and sent back.] Redford proceeded to call his sculptor friend to make something for Newman’s garden. Three weeks later, Redford said, “I went over to see it and it was horrible. But it was just sort of what I had hoped.” So he had the guys “take it back to Newman’s place and put it in his garden…And to this day, neither Paul nor I ever spoke about it.”

Charles Robert Redford Jr.’s passing yesterday had QI’s brain trust somberly remembering his best movies. Redford’s second and final film that he made with Newman, 1973’s The Sting, quickly translated to the New York Fed’s Business Leaders Survey. No doubt, the headline number got stung, falling to -19.4 in September, down from August’s -11.7 (not depicted). The fourth such test of the critical -20 threshold since 2023 solidified the drop-off from July’s “bounce” to -9.3 and reinforced the move as a ‘quadruple dip’.