The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man

This posthumous memoir presents Paul Newman's life in his own words, drawn from recorded conversations conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Newman frames the project as an attempt to explain himself to his children, correct the mythology surrounding his public image, and leave an honest record.

At the memoir's center is a metaphor Newman returns to repeatedly: his sense of being split between two selves. One is "the decoration," the outwardly attractive child his mother prized for appearance, and the other is "the orphan," the neglected inner core that retreated in self-protection. Newman was born in 1925 in Shaker Heights, an affluent Cleveland suburb, where his father, Arthur Sr., ran a prominent sporting-goods company. His mother, Tress, had immigrated from Eastern Europe in poverty and married Arthur Sr. after divorcing an abusive first husband; his father's Jewish family disapproved of her as a Gentile and a social inferior. Tress became obsessively devoted to appearances; Newman compares her smothering love to feeding her dogs chocolates until they grew obese and sick. Arthur Sr. had abandoned his dream of becoming a writer for the family business and became a secret drinker, hiding bourbon bottles in closets. The household was marked by explosive arguments, long silences at dinner, and pervasive dissatisfaction. Newman's strongest childhood memory of his father is a Sunday walk during which neither could find anything meaningful to say. He reflects that he never had a mentor of any kind.

Newman's adolescence brought painful shyness and the sting of anti-Semitism. Too small for football and invisible to girls, he measured himself by what he was not. Being half-Jewish meant exclusion from a high school fraternity and a pervasive sense of not belonging. After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Navy hoping to become a pilot but was disqualified due to color blindness, retraining as a radioman and gunner on torpedo bombers. His wartime experience was shaped more by luck than combat: His original assignment to the USS Bunker Hill was averted when his pilot fell ill, and the carrier was later struck by kamikaze planes off Okinawa, killing most of the squadron's crew. Newman reflects that the war left almost no emotional mark on him.

After his discharge in 1946, Newman enrolled at Kenyon College in Ohio, where beer, theater, and entrepreneurship defined his experience more than academics. A bar fight that led to his removal from the football team pushed him toward the speech department, where he performed in numerous plays. He also founded a laundry business that offered free beer to customers, which he considered his greatest college triumph.

At a summer-stock theater in Wisconsin, Newman met Jackie Witte, a drama student, and they married within months. Their son Scott was born in 1950, during the period of Arthur Sr.'s terminal illness. Newman worked at the family business while his father deteriorated, and Jackie endured daily hostility from Tress. Arthur Sr. died at fifty-six, and Newman enrolled at the Yale School of Drama. After about eight months, a talent agent spotted him in a student production and encouraged him to try New York. He moved Jackie and Scott to Staten Island and joined the Actors Studio, the prestigious acting workshop.

His break came with a role in the Broadway production of William Inge's Picnic, where he met Joanne Woodward, a twenty-three-year-old understudy who taught him to dance for the show's pivotal scene. Newman describes Joanne as the person who awakened his sexuality and confidence. Their affair began during Picnic and continued intermittently for years, marked by passionate reunions and Newman's inability to leave Jackie, with whom he had two more children, Susan and Stephanie.

Newman's first film, The Silver Chalice (1955), a biblical epic for Warner Bros., was an experience he loathed. He found himself trapped in a long-term studio contract and eventually bought his way out for $500,000. His career gained momentum after James Dean's death in 1955, when Newman took over roles originally intended for Dean, including the lead in Somebody Up There Likes Me, a biography of boxer Rocky Graziano. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) earned him his first Oscar nomination, and The Long, Hot Summer (1958) was his first film with Joanne.

Newman divorced Jackie and married Joanne in Las Vegas in January 1958, and together they had three daughters: Nell, Lissy, and Clea. Newman acknowledges having no philosophy of parenting and recognizes that his fame, constant relocations, and emotional remoteness harmed his children. His relationship with Scott is a source of particular anguish. He never told Scott it was acceptable not to emulate his father, and Scott struggled with addiction. Scott died from an accidental drug overdose in 1978 while Newman was directing a play at Kenyon College. He continued rehearsals for days before returning to Los Angeles. Newman repeatedly asks for Scott's forgiveness, wanting to embrace responsibility for whatever part of himself contributed to his son's destruction.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Newman earned Oscar nominations for The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), and Cool Hand Luke (1967), though he did not win. He made his directorial debut with Rachel, Rachel (1968) as a vehicle for Joanne, believing audiences were not seeing her full range; the film earned four Oscar nominations. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) was a massive commercial success. Newman's political engagement also deepened, leading him to campaign for Eugene McCarthy's antiwar presidential bid and to participate in civil rights activities in Alabama.

Newman's drinking reached its peak in the early 1970s, particularly during the troubled production of Sometimes a Great Notion, when he was simultaneously starring and directing. Joanne found him on the floor one night with his head bleeding after falling out of bed and came close to leaving. He largely gave up hard liquor afterward but continued drinking beer in large quantities. For The Verdict (1982), director Sidney Lumet challenged Newman during rehearsals: "You have to decide how much of you you're going to let us see. It's you that's missing, the heartbeat" (262). Newman returned the following week transformed.

Auto racing, which Newman discovered while filming Winning (1969), became a lifelong passion that provided what acting could not: clean, unambiguous results. He won multiple national championships and co-founded Newman-Haas Racing. His charitable endeavors included Newman's Own, a food company begun as a lark with friend A. E. Hotchner that directed all profits to charity, and the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for seriously ill children.

Newman closes the memoir wondering whether the "orphan" and the "decoration" will ever merge into a whole person. He identifies acting as the one arena where he feels most together, a sanctuary where he can experience emotions without being penalized for them. He does not believe in an afterlife but imagines that when he is buried, someone will yell "Cut!" and a director will order another take: "It will all turn out to be some kind of joke" (282). In an afterword, his daughter Clea Newman Soderlund notes that Newman continued to evolve after these interviews, becoming more emotionally present. He won his Oscar for The Color of Money, returned to Broadway at seventy-seven, and expanded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp into the global SeriousFun Children's Network. The Economist's obituary called him "the most generous individual, relative to his income, in the twentieth-century history of the United States" (287). Newman died in 2008 at eighty-three, surrounded by his family.