Clea Newman Carries the Torch for Her Father’s Philanthropic Legacy
Clea Newman remembers her first time volunteering with SeriousFun, the globe-spanning, free camp network for ill children. It was just the one camp back then — in Connecticut — set up by celebrated actor, activist and American icon Paul Newman in 1988. “My dad said, ‘Why don’t you go up and volunteer as a counselor?’” she recalls to The Hollywood Reporter. “I never really babysat much. I was a little nervous about it. And he said, ‘Just try it.’” At the time, Newman, the youngest of his six children, had a whole career mapped out in law. She giggles thinking about it now. “That ended up not being the plan,” she says over Zoom, those signature Newman eyes — piercing blue — twinkling. Soon after she arrived at camp, she was struck down by poison ivy. “[It was] horrible — all over my legs,” she remembers. But luckily for Newman, she had befriended three young boys, around the age of nine, staying at the camp, who took better care of her than she could ever have imagined: “They took …
