(3 of 6)
Hotch made an appointment with a mayonnaise bottler in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. He was frisked and escorted to a crowded office, where, through the thick haze of cigar smoke, he was faced with a group of five men who lounged on chairs arranged around a large central desk. They wore bright neckties and sported diamond rings on their pinkies. Hotch was offered a seat, a cigar, and a glass of Sambuca. Hotch loathed Sambuca, but he downed it bravely. The guy behind the desk, who had hands the size of catcher's mitts, did the talking. "So, kid, you're into salad dressing with this Newman actor and you're lookin' to get it bottled, right? Okay. You're usin' olive oil? Good. That's where we come in. In fact, that's where we are. Take a look at that glass case over there ... No, not the one with the guns, the one with the Umbria olive oil. That's us--we got olive oil by the balls. You use our olive oil, we bottle your dressing, you'll have dressing by the balls."
An assembly line was filling bottles of mayonnaise. Hotch was expecting a scrubbed Hellmann's-esque scene with white-robed, hair-capped workers tending rows of antiseptically serviced jars; instead, he saw a line of disheveled people, no covering on hands or hair, desultorily filling jars as they moved past on a slow-moving belt. "Well, kid," said the Godfather behind the desk, "we'll spring for the olive oil and we split fifty-fifty, but we got to go with the Umbria name, not this--what'd you call it?" There are probably still track marks from Hotch's 'Vette, bearing indelible testimony to his frightened foot on the throttle as he fled the scene.
Scarcely a day passed but what Paul was calling from some unlikely place. He phoned Hotch from racetracks, in between his races, on location while shooting Absence of Malice and The Verdict, from airports on his way to make speeches on behalf of the nuclear freeze movement. The overriding purpose of these phone calls was to get his dressing into a bottle, a bottle bearing the Newman's Own name on a proper label, a bottle that would allow us to thumb our noses at the naysayers. Paul had always been perverse about complacency. It was his theory that he had to keep things off balance or it's finito. That's why he took up racing cars when they said, Not when you're 47 years old, you out of your mind? That perversity also accounted for many of his risky movie roles, going where he hadn't been before.
None of the big commercial bottlers took us seriously. With the help of a local food broker, David Kalman, we finally did locate a bottler named Andy Crowley, who was exactly the kind of bottler we were seeking; Crowley ran Ken's, a small bottling plant outside Boston that made bottled dressing for Ken's Steakhouse, a modest Boston restaurant, and a private-label dressing for Stop & Shop. Kalman arranged to meet with Crowley at Boston's Logan Airport, but first he needed the formula for the dressing. Paul was packing to go someplace, but before taking off, he paused to scribble the ingredients for the dressing on a brown paper bag, which is what Kalman showed Crowley at the airport meeting.