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"Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man" by Paul Newman.
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Review: Newman's posthumous memoir reveals the man behind that handsome face

Knopf

Review: Newman's posthumous memoir reveals the man behind that handsome face

Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir is far more than a celebrity biopic. Newman’s narrative dominates, but commentary and anecdotes from his co-writer and friend Stewart Stern, other luminaries of the movie business, friends and Newman’s own family make this loosely chronological treatment of the legendary film star unusually compelling.

The backstory of a project Newman and Stern began in 1996 as oral history is interesting, but Newman’s voice — skeptical, sharp, self-deprecating — makes it memorable. As one might expect of a man whose physical attractiveness and emotional intelligence led to enduring and not always welcome prominence, Newman has tales to tell and they don’t paint him in the kindest light.


“THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN”
By Paul Newman
Knopf ($32)

They span horrible alcoholic incidents (he was a blackout drunk for much of his life), harrowing accounts of his car-racing prowess, vividly depressing vignettes of being a child of the bourgeoisie in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and insights into two very different marriages.

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At the same time, there are stories of how he cared for his six children by his wives, and the ending, which focuses on his signature salad dressing and charitable work at his Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for seriously ill kids is moving. So is his account of his feelings of failure toward his kids, particularly Scott, his only son. Scott Newman, also an actor, died of a drug overdose in 1978, nearly 30 years before his father’s death in September 2008.

Newman’s accomplishments in theater and film — “Picnic” and “The Desperate Hours” on stage, “The Hustler,” “Hud,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Slap Shot” at the movies — still startle, particularly coming from someone unable to view himself as substantial. Newman’s portrayals of flawed, macho men in such films as “Hud” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” remain definitively full-bodied.

“I wasn’t naturally anything,” Newman writes of his early years. “I wasn’t a lover. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t a student. I wasn’t a leader. I measured things by what I wasn’t, not by anything I was.”

What he was was entrepreneurial. At Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where Newman worked in theater but in effect majored in chugalug, he established a laundry collection agency that drew local kids with the promise of free beer. “If your clothes aren’t becoming to you, you should be coming to me,” it said on the receipt. Newman’s Laundry was such a smash, he sold the business when he left Gambier. 

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The stories illuminate different facets of a man who describes himself as an “emotional Republican,” a man whose vulnerability, no matter how closely guarded, Robert Altman valued highly. He directed Newman in “Quintet,” a film Roger Ebert said “defies any attempt to explain it.”

“When he opens up, when he shows you his pink places, that’s when you can say, ‘There’s a real soul, a real flesh-and-blood somebody throbbing in there,’ ” Altman said of Newman. 

At first, the shifts in narrator may seem jarring, but the recollections and the speculations never drag. The book moves fast, one anecdote seeming to spur the next. And none is boring.

“The first time Paul and I shook hands … I couldn’t look at him,” says Piper Laurie, Newman’s love interest in “The Hustler.”

“I went through that thing that a lot of women go through when they meet Paul. The eyes, those brilliant clear eyes, the beautiful face.”

That beautiful face with its baby blues, oversensitive to light, became an albatross, Newman suggests. Through such details, Newman and the hive mind that spawned this memoir bring an icon down to earth without clipping his wings.

Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer from Cleveland.

First Published: October 27, 2022, 10:00 a.m.

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"Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man" by Paul Newman.  (Knopf)
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