What’s in it for me? Delve into the complex and fascinating life of one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars.
For a period of five years, from 1986 to 1991, the actor Paul Newman worked on telling his life story.
With the intent of “setting the record straight,” and leaving something valuable behind for his children and grandkids, Newman dictated his memoirs to tape.
With the help of his friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, interviews with friends and family were conducted and transcriptions were made.
Alas, after 1991, those transcriptions sat in storage for years.
It wasn’t until after Newman’s death, in 2008, that family members began to look for the unfinished remnants of the project.
And it wasn’t until 2019 that the first clues were discovered, and the pieces began to fall into place.
Finally, we have the stories and insights that the notoriously guarded Newman wanted to leave behind for his family.
They are a true gift to those who knew him, and to the many fans who only think they knew the man from classic movies like Hud, The Verdict, Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
It’s worth noting that Newman’s memoir doesn’t spend a lot of time going behind the scenes of these films or dishing fun anecdotes about Hollywood stars.
Newman is much more interested in trying to make sense of his unusual life and explain what was going on in his mind when he rocketed to fame in the 1950s and ’60s.
The Decorative Boy
Decoration.
This word comes up a lot when Paul Newman thinks back to his childhood.
He was born in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Shaker Heights, in 1925.
To say that his mom, Tess, kept a clean house would be an understatement.
It was so clean, it didn’t look like anyone lived there.
It was a well-decorated house, and looking back, Newman can see that he was just another of his mom’s decorations.
In fact, Newman sees two sides of himself: the decorative boy and the orphan.
The decorative boy got dolled up and fussed over by his mom, was paraded around in front of her friends, and tried to please.
The one who was treated as though he was nothing more than an extension of his mother.
The orphan, however, was his core being.
The orphan was the one who didn’t know what was happening to him or who he really was.
The one who would spend the next 50 years trying to catch up and deal with what his mother’s upbringing had done to him.
Like trying to cope with the fact that, if Paul had been an unattractive child, his mom wouldn’t have paid him any attention at all.
Meanwhile, Paul’s father, Art Newman Sr.
, was co-owner of a local sporting-goods store.
Art Sr.
also had unhealthy ways of subtly rebelling against the domineering powers of the Newman matriarch.
He hid bottles of bourbon in the house.
When he got home from work he would take a couple shots from a bottle in his closet.
Other times, he would sneak down to the basement, usually under the guise of checking on the water heater, in order to drink and smoke cigarettes.
On some special occasions, Art Sr.
would more actively protest Tess’s desires for picture-perfect domesticity.
Tess would have the table perfectly arranged, with an ironed tablecloth and fine china, the kids wearing their best suits and ties, and then Art Sr.
would sit down at the table wearing his dirtiest, rattiest clothes.
Stuff like this could lead to screaming fights between the parents.
Paul remembers a time when Tess grabbed a large framed picture off the wall and brought it down right over her husband’s head.
Art Sr.
was left walking around, wearing the frame like a giant necklace.
Paul knows that because of these family dynamics he started building up walls around himself long ago.
Walls that made it difficult to be in touch with his own feelings and communicate with others.
He wonders if his father’s alcoholism and his inability to communicate led to some of these issues – as well as Paul’s own heavy drinking, and the terrible addiction problems his first son, Scott, faced.
We’ll get into this, and more, in the sections ahead, as Paul stumbles into acting, marriage, and fatherhood, in very quick succession.
Free Beer With Every Laundry
Newman always had a good work ethic.
While he spent some time working for his father’s sporting-goods store, he was happier on his own, running his own paper route or even making $40 a week as a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman.
That’s right, at just 13 years old, Paul was dragging a suitcase around his neighborhood selling brushes and brooms to bored housewives.
Newman also liked sports, but for the majority of his childhood and adolescence, he was whisper thin, not even topping the hundred pound mark on the scale.
As he saw it, he was a lightweight in more ways than one.
He wasn’t a great student at school or much of an athlete, two areas where he felt like he let his father down.
But Newman’s life was about to take a turn as the US entered the Second World War in 1941.
When he enrolled at Ohio University, his eighteenth birthday was just around the corner.
So, knowing he’d be officially called for duty around that time, he also enlisted in the Navy.
Newman wanted to be a pilot, but didn’t pass the tests.
So he had to settle for being a radioman and rear gunner.
After training in Hawaii, he spent time in Guam and was sent to Saipan, just after a deadly battle had taken place.
In April of 1946, with the war having drawn to a close, Newman was honorably discharged.
Unlike some of the soldiers from his original squadron, he was fortunate to come out of the war alive and unwounded.
In fact, the war left him remarkably unchanged.
He doesn’t recall feeling afraid or courageous.
Truth be told, he doesn’t feel like his time in the military gave him any sense of greater maturity at all.
He believes that the only notable thing that happened was that he grew about five inches taller.
So, when he went back to college, this time attending Kenyon College in Ohio, he was no longer the short and scrawny kid that had enlisted.
It was at Kenyon that Newman made his first steps toward getting seriously into acting.
It was also the place where his beer drinking first rose to epic proportions.
He recalls his first day: being dropped of on campus at 3:00 p.
m.
, immediately coming across a keg of beer, and being completely “crocked” by 6:00 p.
m.
Newman did a variety of plays at Kenyon, including The Front Page, R.
U.
R.
, Heartbreak House and Charley’s Aunt.
Some people were impressed with his work, particularly his bold take on Petruchio in Shakespear’s bawdy farce, The Taming of the Shrew.
But he never saw anything special about his acting.
As a matter of fact, he didn’t enjoy acting at all.
He enjoyed the preparation, the building of the sets, the camaraderie.
But acting itself gave him very little thrill, which is another reason why he thinks he took to drinking so much.
The unpredictability and exuberance of drinking held a far greater appeal.
So, when looking back at his time at Kenyon, it isn’t his accomplishments on the stage that Newman feels proudest of.
Rather it’s his laundry business.
Those close to him at the time thought Newman’s idea of starting a laundry service on the town’s Main Street was doomed to fail.
But he had a great hook for driving students to the business.
If you brought in your clothes, you’d get a free beer.
He also had some pretty good slogans, like “If your clothes aren’t becoming to you, you should be coming to me.
” By the time he graduated at Kenyon, Newman’s Laundry wasn’t just successful, it made every other student laundry service defunct and he was able to sell the company before he left town.
As Newman puts it, “That was my real success story at college.
Back Home and Back to School
At least one of Paul Newman’s Kenyon classmates paints the burgeoning actor as a bit of a devil.
According to him, Paul was not only ambitious; he drank more and screwed more than just about any other guy on campus.
Newman’s own recollections don’t exactly contradict this hellraiser image.
But as far as romantic relationships go, it would only be after college that he met someone he felt he could actually talk to.
That woman was Jackie Witte.
Paul met Jackie right after graduating, when he left Kenyon to join a summer-stock theater group in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.
Jackie was another of the players, and Paul was so smitten with her that the two were soon married and Jackie was pregnant with their first child.
Then, the unexpected happened: In January 1950, Paul’s father was diagnosed with inoperable cancer.
With few other prospects, the couple moved to Shaker Heights, where Paul helped out at the family sporting-goods store, and a very pregnant Jackie tried to stay out of the way of Paul’s increasingly agitated mother.
Art Sr.
finally passed away in May 1950.
Since then, Paul has wondered what, if anything, he got from his father’s upbringing.
The best he can say is that he got a small sense of morality from him.
But what he didn’t get, from either of his parents, was emotional support or a sense of self.
It’s something Paul would continue to struggle with as he moved on with his life.
While he’d gotten some acting work doing TV commercials in Cleveland, Paul could sense the need to get away from his hometown.
Since he had a little time before his education benefits through the GI Bill expired, he decided to apply to the Yale School of Drama.
Actually, he was thinking about getting a master’s degree in directing – something he could fall back on if the acting jobs dried up.
He was about to become a father, after all.
But there was very little planning going on at this time.
Just a sense of needing to move on, if not run away.
Yale did accept Paul.
And his first son, Scott, was born not long after they moved to Connecticut.
Already, however, Paul was sensing his disconnect from his marriage and to his role as a father.
He felt like there was a wall growing between him and Jackie, and that he was failing at every turn.
So he threw himself into his classes.
Yale required a lot of work on a daily basis.
Perhaps the most important thing to come out of it was Paul being cast in the play Beethoven.
Not only that, he was given production’s flashiest role: Karl Beethoven, the deceitful nephew of the legendary composer.
It was rare for a first year student to get what was essentially the lead part.
And Paul’s performance didn’t go unnoticed.
Backstage, Paul was approached by one of Broadway’s biggest talent agencies.
Soon, Paul was making day trips to New York City, and after only spending eight months with Yale, Paul was ready to give New York his full attention.
From the Studio to the Big Screen
How did I pass that audition?
It’s a question that always bugged Paul Newman.
The audition he’s referring to is the one he did for The Actor’s Studio, a bold new acting school that, at the time, included such luminaries as James Dean, Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando, and Ben Gazzara.
Actually, Brando was already considered an alumnus when Newman showed up, and his fame was one of the reasons why the school already had a star-making reputation.
But Newman was indeed accepted, and he joined the ranks of some of his generation’s best actors, who were learning from the esteemed teacher Lee Strasberg.
Still, Newman remained puzzled and felt certain that the other students at the school could sense his lack of talent.
For the most part, he stood back and just watched.
He recognized how the best actors could do what needed to be done through nothing but movement and intentions.
From his perspective, it would be another thirty years before he really got to that level.
Around this time, at the start of 1953, another major upheaval in Newman’s life was about to get underway.
Paul got cast in the Broadway play Picnic.
Initially, he was cast in a supporting role, even though he was eager to play the lead.
The director told Newman that he’d like to, but that he just didn’t have the dangerous sexual energy that the lead role required.
Still, he made Paul the understudy for the lead.
That dangerous sexual energy was something that Paul would discover within himself while working on the play.
It was something that another actor in the cast, Joanne Woodward, would bring out of him.
Sparks flew between Paul and Joanne from the moment they met.
As Newman recalls, Joanne “gave birth to a sexual creature.
” She was the teacher, Paul was the eager student.
And soon they were meeting for trysts all over New York City.
Sure enough, Paul was eventually given the lead role in Picnic, which garnered him massive attention and essentially launched his career.
Of course, this came at a price.
Newman remained married to Jackie for four more years, having two more children together (daughters Susan and Stephanie), but things only got more strained between the two as Paul became busier, traveled to Hollywood and continued seeing Joanne.
He describes his indecision during this period as “horrible.
” There was guilt.
But the passionate connection between Paul and Joanne was also inescapable, so the affair continued.
Newman’s star was quickly rising.
But this wasn’t so straightforward, either.
While Paul was in demand in Hollywood, he was often in competition for roles with the other handsome young star of the day, James Dean.
Tragically, Dean died in a car crash in September 1955, which meant that Newman inherited at least two of the roles Dean was set to play.
One was the real-life role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in the film, Someone Up There Likes Me, and the other was a live TV broadcast of a Hemingway adaptation entitled The Battler.
Both of these roles earned Newman more praise, but there has been a lingering question of how much of Newman’s early success – if any – was due to Dean’s death.
Newman is partially convinced that his career would have turned out the same, even if it would have happened a little slower.
Instead, it was all happening rather fast, and by 1957, Newman was starring in big films like The Long, Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, acting opposite stars like Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor.
The Long, Hot Summer was also the film that reunited Paul and Joanne Woodward as costars.
This helped push Newman to divorce Jackie and marry Joanne – two things that happened, one right after the other, in 1958.
(Paul and Joanne remained married until Paul’s passing in 2008.
) It was a new life – a relief – being able to be with Joanne in public.
Within a couple years, Paul and Joanne would have their first child together, Nell.
Another daughter, Lissy, would follow in 1961, and finally Clea arrived in 1965.
This time, the Newman family would travel together to whatever film Paul was working on.
Though, even after his sixth child arrived, Paul would never quite get a handle on being a father.
Beyond Acting
Fame and popularity didn’t always sit well with Paul Newman.
He was always suspicious.
Perhaps because of his relationship with his mom, and the decorative boy aspect of him that was created back then, he bristled at the attention.
He had to wonder, was all the attention due to his good looks and piercing blue eyes, or for his talent?
Was he a good actor, or just a sex symbol?
It didn’t help that, especially in the early days, people often mistook him for Marlon Brando.
Was it all interchangeable?
Did any of it really matter?
When Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was released in 1958, Newman was already getting fed up with the Hollywood system.
But with fame, there’s also an aspect of power that can be useful, especially when it comes to being able to pick your projects or drawing attention to good causes.
So, in the 1960s, Newman began gravitating toward things that he did feel were important, such as politics and civil rights.
Paul was involved in supporting Democratic presidential candidates throughout the 1960s and ’70s.
You could say this involvement culminated in his appointment to the United Nations Conference on Nuclear Disarmament in 1978.
The sixties also introduced Newman to the thrill of race car driving, primarily through his involvement in the 1969 movie Winning.
After learning the ropes during production, Newman continued to be involved in car racing for the rest of his life.
He eventually started up the Newman/Haas Racing Team in 1983, which would go on to win over 100 championships, thanks in part to the involvement of famed drivers Mario Andretti and Michael Andretti.
While fame made these kinds of meaningful endeavors possible, especially when movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundace Kid became massive box office hits, there was also a dark side to it.
As Paul’s first son, Scott, got older, he naturally gravitated toward his father’s profession.
But being the son of one of the biggest, most handsome movie stars in Hollywood is as much of a curse as it is a career boost.
Tragically, Scott experienced a long battle with addiction before fatally overdosing in 1978.
Paul openly wonders whether his children would have been better off if he’d chosen a different career path.
He also admits that being a father never came naturally to him.
He sometimes describes himself as being anesthetized, incapable of feeling highs and lows, unable to reach certain feelings and communicate honestly with loved ones.
It’s something he’s only begun to properly grapple with as he looks back on his life.
He knows that he hasn’t always acted in the best interest of his children.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to move them from place to place as his job dictated.
As he got older, he tried to make better decisions.
He also sought help from psychiatry and would talk to his therapists about his marriage, his kids and his drinking.
Maybe he could become more like an adult.
It had mixed results: He stopped drinking hard liquor, relying only on beer, but would often drink as much as a case of beer a day.
Joanne mentions that the drinking was, for a time, “the anguish of our lives,” but that it gradually became less and less, to where it was a small glass of wine at night.
Newman’s history with drinking is perhaps why he considers his role in the 1982 film The Verdict to be his best performance.
Or at least, the best role for him to play.
According to others, there were only two scripts that Paul read and felt immediately right for the part.
One was the 1961 movie, The Hustler, where he played the smooth-talking pool shark “Fast Eddie” Felson.
The other was The Verdict, where he played Frank Galvin, an alcoholic small-time lawyer who takes on a legal battle against a big hospital.
It was with The Verdict that Newman was finally able to achieve that natural state of acting that he’d admired in others back at The Actor’s Studio.
As he describes it, this role was the first time he achieved “comfortable emotional moments” in a film.
The director of the film, Sidney Lumet, believes that Paul had been waiting for someone to challenge him and push his talents to a certain degree.
That’s what happened with The Verdict, and he believes it led to Newman making self-revelations during the making of the film, which is what great acting is all about.
Newman would go on to give more great performances, including his return to the role of Eddie Felson in the 1986 film, The Color of Money, which won him his first Academy Award for Best Actor.
The eighties would also mark a move into philanthropy.
First was a line of food products that began with homemade salad dressings that Newman and his friend would put into old wine bottles and sell at local shops.
They proved so popular that the Newman’s Own brand was started, with the intent on giving all profits to charity.
It has since donated over $550 million to a number of humanitarian organizations.
The other endeavor is called the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, which is a summer camp for children with cancer and other serious illnesses.
When a friend died in 1987, Newman was inspired to create something that might give kids a sense of accomplishment before their life is cut short.
Another of Newman’s friends calls the camp the “purest expression” of who Paul is as a person, and perhaps the one accomplishment that has touched Paul the deepest.
Finally, after six decades of lagging behind, the orphan was catching up to the decorative boy.
Paul Newman was starting to feel complete, like one person.
What will that person be like if the two sides actually do come together?
Paul is eager to find out.
Final summary
Paul Newman always struggled to cope with the effects of his childhood.
His mom was a smothering, domineering force in his life, and his father was a secret alcoholic who died prematurely.
Newman struggled with his own dependence on alcohol after he served in the Navy and went on to become a celebrated actor.
His first marriage didn’t last after he moved to New York and met Joanne Woodward.
His relationship with Woodward unlocked Newman’s sexuality, helping to launch his career and make him a better actor.
Newman had six kids between his two marriages.
He struggled with fatherhood and tragically lost one of his kids to addiction.
As Newman’s fame grew, he used his status to pursue other endeavors, like car racing and humanitarian causes.