Life's Pleasures Quote by Lew Wasserman

The line lands because it treats debauchery like a resume line, and you can hear the producer’s grin in the phrasing. Lew Wasserman, the ultimate Hollywood power broker, isn’t just telling a drinking story about Paul Newman; he’s quietly staging a little mythmaking. “Old friend of ours out of Cleveland” pulls Newman back from movie-star altitude and drops him into a Midwestern, living-room intimacy. It’s not the red-carpet Newman. It’s the guy who “used to sit around our house,” a detail that functions as social proof: we weren’t dazzled by celebrity; celebrity came to us.

Then comes the punch: a case of beer alone, delivered with the cadence of an anecdote that’s been workshopped for maximum effect. Calling it “talent” is the sly move. Wasserman doesn’t moralize, doesn’t wink too hard, but he reframes excess as performance, as a kind of American virtuosity. In the entertainment business, that’s a familiar alchemy: vices become charm; appetite becomes charisma; self-destruction gets sanded into folklore.

Context matters. Wasserman helped professionalize Hollywood’s deal-making and image management. So the subtext here is control. He’s humanizing Newman while also claiming proximity to him, drawing a boundary between insiders who knew the “real” guy and the public who only saw the icon. The humor isn’t just about drinking; it’s about power - the power to define what counts as impressive, and to turn a messy private moment into a story that flatters everyone in the room.