In January 1975, when Paul Newman turned 50, his friend Robert Redford sent him an unusual gift. The pair had bonded over their love of fast cars while filming 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Newman had become enamored of Redford’s extremely rare Porsche 904. Newman started racing professionally soon after, but his petrolhead passion became too much for his younger co-star.
“I started to get bored, because every time we got together all he talked about was racing and cars,” recalled Redford, who died today aged 89, in an interview at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library in 2014. “So I decided to play a joke on him. I called a towing service and said, ‘Do you have any crushed automobiles? Do you have a Porsche?’” As luck would have it, they did have a recently destroyed Porsche, so Redford had the whole thing gift wrapped, tied up with a bow, and sent to Newman’s home in Connecticut.
