The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir

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In late September, she was speaking from the rustic abode in Westport, Conn., that she called the “hippie home,” which her parents bought some 60 years ago (and she later bought from them), stuffed from top to bottom with mementos from their lives and careers: photos of her father with Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, and of her mother washing dogs in the kitchen sink. Paul Newman died in 2008 but he had been working on his memoirs since 1986. After he died his family and friends set about trying to finish this project. It took about 5 years and I think it was well worth the wait.

To say he was an extraordinary man would be an understatement. he saw himself as a working actor, not a movie star, and insisted that everyone else did the same. There was no ego, no entourage, no hangers on. Only Paul, his script and his incredible spirit. One can say this about very few people, but he was a truly great man. It seems to me to be one of the great 20th-century lives: he was famously generous, with his extraordinary and unstinting work for his charities, he was a shining example of how to use global fame for the greater good, and most of all he was one of the great movie actors of this or any other age. [Directing Newman] was the highlight of my professional life.' Sam Mendes

Newman was a fine driver, who was famous in Hollywood for doing his own stunt driving as often as not.' Ron Dennis, Formula 1's McLaren Chief Drawn from conversations between the late actor Paul Newman and screenwriter Stewart Stern, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man sees the Cool Hand Luke star reflecting on a life marked by dizzying success and psychological pain. The interviews, which took place over five years from 1986, were seemingly forgotten until Newman’s children unearthed them in 2019 and turned them into this memoir-cum-oral history. He was fascinated by this idea of how people viewed him versus how he felt about himself,” said his daughter Melissa Newman. “I always had this vision of my dad standing beside a giant billboard of himself. And he’s waving at the bottom of the billboard, going, ‘I’m over here.’” Though there was some discussion of releasing the book as an oral history, Rosenthal said that presenting it as a memoir from Newman was more profound and powerful. “You’ve got enough of his voice to make it first person without substantially changing anything,” he said. The one thing I’ve always admired is excellence. I recognize it in almost anything: plumbers, museum guides, limousine drivers, bank tellers—I delight in seeing it. Maybe we choose those arenas in which we have the best chance for excellence. For me, maybe that’s acting, or being somehow connected to the theater, or capitalizing on the way I look, or fooling people”

Memoir is loosely applied here. This is the transcript of a recorded series of conversations between Paul Newman and screenwriter friend Stewart Stern in the late 80s- early 90s that two of Newman's daughters published years after their father's death, with added bits and pieces from other friends, family and industry colleagues to round out the anecdotes and memories. In this way, it is mostly Newman's own words, but it's impossible to know if this is how he would have chosen to present his story and his voice. And that was the least of it. The Sully of my novel was based on my father, who was absent during much of my young life (as Paul apparently was through much of his son’s). He became interested in me when I was old enough to occupy the bar stool next to his. It was only during the years when I returned home from college to work summer road construction that we became close. When he died, I was stunned by the size of the hole his absence left in my life. I thought I knew quite a bit about his life. Turns out, I knew next to nothing. From the long standing affair he had with Woodward, prior to his divorce and marriage to her, to the death of his beloved only son, I learned so much about his upbringing, his marriages, parenting and most importantly, his philanthropy. Per his daughter, “his obituary in the economist noted he was the most generous individual, relative to income, in the twentieth century history of the United State. He was also incredibly loyal to his friends and helped beyond what most people would do. I know of a few times he gave up part of his salary to his co-stars to level the playing field. He strove for fairness in all things.” Newman at his best...with his self-aware persona, storied marriage and generous charitable activities...this rich book somehow imbues his characters' pain and joy with fresh technicolor." -- The Wall Street Journal You work what you consider pretty hard at your craft, and you're getting to the point where you're just starting to feel kind of good about yourself, and then somebody says, 'Oh, God, take off your sunglasses so I can see your baby-blue eyes!' " Newman said, in an excerpt from the book released by People.

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An excessively private man he started to make notes for an intended Memoir and then gave it up. His children found much of the documents long after his death and decided to share it with the public. Since they are his children they would know better than I if he would be pleased about this or not – considering he passed away so many years ago, maybe now he couldn’t care less. Still, it's a fascinating portrait of an actor of preternatural beauty who worked extraordinarily hard at his craft. His complicated childhood and fraught personal life as a young man imprinted him early with a need to be seen and yet fiercely guard his true self. Understanding the irony that his looks would breed jealousy and suspicion in an industry where beauty opens doors, Paul Newman pursued gritty, hard-edged roles ( Hud, Cool Hand Luke), but there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that he would escape the sex symbol status that vaulted him to the top of the celebrity A-list. Do I really want to watch eternal faves like THE HUSTLER, ABSENCE OF MALICE, SLAP SHOT, NOBODY'S FOOL and think about what a shitty young husband and father Paul Newman was? How mean he could be when he was drunk? That he didn't speak to his mom for fifteen years? This is pieced together from work Newman did for a memoir project earlier in his life that he never ended up finishing. It does help you feel like you know him as a person, and in compiling it they've done a good job of bringing in a few other voices from other people he had interviewed. This isn't an industry memoir. The first half or so is his life before fame, and the second half is less linear story and more anecdotes and thoughts around particular topics. I didn't mind it, and Jeff Daniels reading it is a nice choice.

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF AN ORDINARY MAN is revelatory and introspective, personal and analytical, loving and tender in some places, always complex and profound. One of the very finest screen actors of our time. Newman spanned the gap between the golden days of Hollywood, the 40s and 50s with actors like Cary Grant and James Stewart and Clark Gable, and the present lot represented by Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise' Sir Michael Parkinson Newman's often traumatic childhood is brilliantly detailed. He talks about his teenage insecurities, his early failures with women, his rise to stardom, his early rivals (Brando and Dean), his first marriage, his drinking, his philanthropy, the death of his son Scott, his strong desire for his daughters to know and understand the truth about their father. Perhaps the most moving material in the book centers around his relationship with Joanne Woodward - their love for each other, his dependence on her, the way she shaped him intellectually, emotionally and sexually. Then all this was put together for a book about Paul Newman, contributions and stories from his co-stars and directors.

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To start, this book published 14 years after Newman's death is a book Paul Newman never meant for you to read. It was compiled from hours and hours of interviews he did with a screenwriter friend decades ago, and after that session, he decided to burn all of the recordings. However, this book was compiled at the wishes of two of his daughters from the transcripts. Much of this is revealed at the end of the book in an afterward. All of this said, another reason my heart sank when I read the book is more personal. Quite simply, Paul’s portrayal of Sully in Robert Benton’s film of my novel “ Nobody’s Fool” changed my life. The movie not only allowed me to quit teaching and become a full-time writer but opened the door to a lucrative side-hustle as a screenwriter. In a new memoir, the late cinematic icon Paul Newman shares some insight into his complex relationship with stardom–and specifically with the role his appearance played in his own fame. This unforgettable and extraordinary memoir, one of the best and most compelling books of 2022, is a breathtakingly honest mea culpa from a complicated man striving to excavate his demons; according to Newman's daughter Clea, who writes the memoir's afterword, he succeeded in his final decades. As seen in The Last Movie Stars documentary - t he raw, candid, unvarnished memoir of an icon. The greatest movie star of the past 75 years covers everything: his traumatic childhood, his career, his drinking, his thoughts on Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, his greatest roles, acting, his intimate life with Joanne Woodward, his innermost fears and passions and joys. With thoughts/comments throughout from Joanne Woodward, Tom Cruise and many others.

Decades into his singularly successful career as an actor, Paul Newman offered a frank admission. “I am faced with the appalling fact that I don’t know anything,” he said. Beginning with a scene of himself seated on a couch in his library where, Newman says, “I just smoked a joint and remembered with absolute clarity the whole map of my boyhood hometown,” he recounts his upbringing in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Newman’s father helped run the family’s sporting-goods company, drank heavily and seemed uninterested in his children. His mother, by contrast, practically fetishized him, and Newman compares himself to one of her dogs “who became cancerous and so obese they could hardly move, and my mother would keep feeding them chocolates until she killed them with kindness.” You read a celebrity biography/autobiography you would like to know the person, the personality, Newman shows not much personality, a very private and quite person, no mention of co-stars, many films not mentioned at all, no mention of The Towering Inferno at all. The later part of his life when he started his philanthropic organizations and camps for children, he continued to question his life and motivations. His love of car racing continued throughout his later life, and he was quite successful personally and professionally with his racing team. It was also interesting to hear about his view of or relationship with other actors and directors. he was honest to the core, was a loyal friend, very well respected by most people, loved to laugh at his own jokes…..Newman was a complicated man. The forces that drove him were highly contradictory. Keenly aware of his privilege and charitably-inclined, he was also intricately bound to the dictates of a lusty machismo, and fenced with the sparkling blades of his own vanity throughout the course of his life. His mother, he felt, treated him like a doll and a decoration - like a girl, at one point he says - which led him into a dark and disorganizing conflict with regard to his appearance; a conflict that simmered through the many years of his film career and elevation to the status of sex symbol.