The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man summary

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.

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.

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.

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.