Screen legend Paul Newman was a private man with an uncomfortable relationship with stardom. Serious about his work, he wanted to be appreciated for his achievements, not swooned over for his baby blue eyes.
He was happy when Marlon Brando made it easier for other actors to resist the demands of Hollywood studios, publicists and gossip columnists, and he rarely gave interviews, signed autographs or posed with fans.
This was not ingratitude but, he explains in a bracingly candid posthumous memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, — which was published last week, 14 years after his death — a way of protecting the self-esteem that he had gained slowly and painfully by developing his craft.
“I always thought of him as someone who was incredibly fragile and shy,” says Melissa Newman, second of the three daughters Paul had with his second wife, the actress Joanne Woodward, in a marriage that began in 1958 and lasted until his death of cancer in 2008, aged 83.
“That was just my feeling about him,” she continues. “And I always tell people that I pre-mourned him. That 20 to 30 years ago, I used to think of him and think about what it would be like to not have him.
“I could make myself cry, there was just something so fragile about him.”
Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, to a Jewish father, Arthur, and gentile mother, Teresa (known as Tress), in 1925, Newman, according to his close friend, the Jewish screenwriter Stewart Stern (Rebel Without A Cause), became increasingly cryptic, and someone who stayed “beyond the moat of privacy”.
Which makes it all the more surprising that the pair embarked on a series of interviews in 1986 in which Newman bared his soul on subjects such as his troubled childhood; fatherhood; the tragic death of his son from his first marriage; his sexually-charged affair with Woodward; his drinking; and his almost paralysing insecurity and self-doubt.
Stern was possibly the only person who could penetrate the sense of “anaesthetisation and detachment” that Newman discloses he had experienced for a long time (“What shuts a person down? That’s what I want to find out,” said the actor). Stern also kept Newman engaged in the process for five years.
“Stewart adored my father,” says Melissa. “He met him 12 days before my mother met him, and he was completely smitten with my dad, and then jealous of my mother as a friend.
And then he and my mother became incredibly close. I always say that they shared this frustration of how difficult loving my father was, and they bonded over that.”
Although Stern was likely the catalyst for the memoir, Melissa believes Newman was “probably ruminating about it”, as he talked in the transcripts about wanting to “make a document for the family”, and setting the record straight. “And, you know, 14,000 pages later . . . .”
Those pages, missing since Stern and Newman ended their talks in 1991, were found by a family friend, producer Emily Wachtel, who, in 2019, discovered a locked cabinet in the basement of Melissa’s late grandmother’s house, where her parents had been living (and Woodward still resides), containing a stack of dialogues between Stern and friends and confidants of Newman.
Later, in a family storage unit, she found a box labelled ‘P.N.history’, inside which were 5,000 pages of Newman’s achingly raw interviews.
Paul Newman (GettyImages)
“So Dad didn’t get rid of them; he kept them.” Newman had given the family written permission to publish a biography, “quaintly” saying, laughs Melissa affectionately, “if there’s any interest”.
When the transcripts appeared, there was already a feeling that “people were starting to forget about [my mother and father],” she says. They provided an opportunity to stop them “fading into obscurity”.
However, it would mean puncturing the fairy tale, not least that of her parents’ “blissfully uncomplicated” 50-year marriage — a version of reality she describes as “bogus” in the book’s foreword.
“So then you have to say, ‘Well, there’s this beautiful, shallow fairytale — what’s that doing? And they’re fading from memory. So, is there anything to be learned from the reality? From a different, modern fairytale, which gives them more credit for the struggle that they had to endure? I think it’s good for people to see that all of the fame and the fortune doesn’t buy your way out of that struggle.”
With so much material available, any number of different versions of the book could have been compiled. David Rosenthal, the editor of The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, “found the story of vulnerability and of self-doubt,” says Melissa, “and definitely doubled down on it”.
As a singer and sculptor herself, she was not surprised by Newman’s “self-deprecation and doubt and imposter syndrome”.
“Art is subjective and, as an artist, I want the Museum Lady to come out of the sky and tell me my work is good, and that just doesn’t happen. So I think the struggle to be an artist, and to try to figure out what being a good artist is, and what being a good actor is, is really mystifying.”
Newman claimed he would not have drunk if he had been fulfilled by acting. Motor racing, a pursuit he discovered making the 1969 film Winning, and which he continued into his 80s, gave him peace. What made the difference?
“It’s a really straightforward thing,” says Melissa. “Art is subjective, speed is objective. You can measure your success with a stopwatch.”
Paul Newman wife wife Joanne in 1999 (GettyImages)
While Newman felt comfortable with the racing set, the book reveals that in his youth his Jewish heritage created a “strong sense of otherness”, and, he told Stern, “got [me]in the way of sitting at the ‘A’ table, which was important to me”.
As a boy, he used humour to deflect pain, and did Yiddish voices for laughs. In the Navy, when someone called him “kike”, he used wrestling skills learned at Ohio University to take down the offender.
He told Stern that other than when he signed up for Kenyon College after the Second World War, and, to his shame, put down his mother’s adopted faith of Christian Scientist, “I never hid my background from anyone. Nobody had to dig it out of me, and I certainly didn’t deny it.”
As his star was rising, he was “given the opportunity to pass” by changing his name to something “really WASPy”.
The producer Sam Spiegel, who had adopted the pseudonym S. P. Eagle, and briefly considered him for the role of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront — the role which made Marlon Brando a star — “asked me to get rid of ‘Paul Newman’”, he said.
“What do you want me to change it to?” Newman replied. “S. P. Ewman?”
“That’s that in a nutshell,” says Melissa. “I think they certainly wanted to neutralise him as far as any kind of ethnic identity was concerned.”
He never stopped identifying as Jewish.
Newman and Woodward in 1962 (GettyImages)
Melissa’s Jewish husband, Raphael Elkind, said to their son when told he was not Jewish during his Birthright trip, “Ask them what the Nazis would say.” Similarly she says of Newman, “I think he still suffered the exact same adversity that he would have if his mother had been Jewish.”
She believes that although the Jewish side of his family were not very religious, their Jewishness expressed itself culturally in their love of language and education. “And in terms of the sort of Talmudic tradition of argument and study, I think that really affected my father,” she says.
“He said he liked doing the research for films and the rehearsal more than he enjoyed actually doing the films, and if that hasn’t the same approach as the Jewish tradition of approaching religion, I don’t know what does. Culturally, I think his Jewishness is absolutely present.”
It is there in the book, too, I suggest, in his almost obsessive weighing up of things, as he searches for a greater truth, which always seems out of reach. “Well, isn’t that Talmudic and in the tradition?” asks Melissa.
Newman worries movingly about his success or failure as a father, and the “unnatural” situation his fame created for his children. Was it damaging? “It really messes with your ego development,” admits Melissa.
As a child, she would make other kids guess who her father was and then delight in their surprise when they discovered it was Paul Newman.
“Just imagine, you’re practically a toddler and you have a magic wand that will suddenly make all attention be on you.”
The price, however, is that “we all, in this family, struggle with this idea that we’re important, not important; worthy, not worthy”.
Melissa now finds herself wondering: “Is this good? Am I good? Is my voice good enough? Is my sculpture good enough? And there’s really no one to tell you. I’m good at what I do. I’m a good artist. But the fact that I can even say I’m an artist took, you know, 5,000 years of therapy.”
The shadow cast by Paul Newman is long, and when she sings, “people can’t listen to me objectively”, she claims.
“If they know [who my parents are] going into the room, they all sit with their arms crossed, and they either say, ‘Well, she’s pretty good considering’ or ‘Why isn’t she better?’ So I get this sort of second-hand and even worse, because I can’t take credit for what my parents did.
"!My parents were extraordinary. And stardom is not a blueprint for adulthood as you’re growing up, it just isn’t. So, just figuring out being able to say that I’m good at something in my own right [has been hard].”
Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man is published by Century
