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Name: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man
Rating: 4.4 (42 reviews)
Author: Paul Newman

Paul Newman

A Memoir

4.4 (42 Bewertungen)

24 Min.

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The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man
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What’s in it for me? Delve into the complex and fascinating life of one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars.

For a period of five years, from 1986 to 1991, the actor Paul Newman worked on telling his life story. With the intent of “setting the record straight,” and leaving something valuable behind for his children and grandkids, Newman dictated his memoirs to tape. With the help of his friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, interviews with friends and family were conducted and transcriptions were made.

Alas, after 1991, those transcriptions sat in storage for years. It wasn’t until after Newman’s death, in 2008, that family members began to look for the unfinished remnants of the project. And it wasn’t until 2019 that the first clues were discovered, and the pieces began to fall into place. Finally, we have the stories and insights that the notoriously guarded Newman wanted to leave behind for his family. They are a true gift to those who knew him, and to the many fans who only think they knew the man from classic movies like Hud, The Verdict, Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It’s worth noting that Newman’s memoir doesn’t spend a lot of time going behind the scenes of these films or dishing fun anecdotes about Hollywood stars. Newman is much more interested in trying to make sense of his unusual life and explain what was going on in his mind when he rocketed to fame in the 1950s and ’60s.

The Decorative Boy

Decoration. This word comes up a lot when Paul Newman thinks back to his childhood. He was born in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Shaker Heights, in 1925. To say that his mom, Tess, kept a clean house would be an understatement. It was so clean, it didn’t look like anyone lived there. It was a well-decorated house, and looking back, Newman can see that he was just another of his mom’s decorations.

In fact, Newman sees two sides of himself: the decorative boy and the orphan. The decorative boy got dolled up and fussed over by his mom, was paraded around in front of her friends, and tried to please. The one who was treated as though he was nothing more than an extension of his mother.

The orphan, however, was his core being. The orphan was the one who didn’t know what was happening to him or who he really was. The one who would spend the next 50 years trying to catch up and deal with what his mother’s upbringing had done to him. Like trying to cope with the fact that, if Paul had been an unattractive child, his mom wouldn’t have paid him any attention at all.

Meanwhile, Paul’s father, Art Newman Sr., was co-owner of a local sporting-goods store. Art Sr. also had unhealthy ways of subtly rebelling against the domineering powers of the Newman matriarch. He hid bottles of bourbon in the house. When he got home from work he would take a couple shots from a bottle in his closet. Other times, he would sneak down to the basement, usually under the guise of checking on the water heater, in order to drink and smoke cigarettes.

On some special occasions, Art Sr. would more actively protest Tess’s desires for picture-perfect domesticity. Tess would have the table perfectly arranged, with an ironed tablecloth and fine china, the kids wearing their best suits and ties, and then Art Sr. would sit down at the table wearing his dirtiest, rattiest clothes. Stuff like this could lead to screaming fights between the parents. Paul remembers a time when Tess grabbed a large framed picture off the wall and brought it down right over her husband’s head. Art Sr. was left walking around, wearing the frame like a giant necklace.

Paul knows that because of these family dynamics he started building up walls around himself long ago. Walls that made it difficult to be in touch with his own feelings and communicate with others. He wonders if his father’s alcoholism and his inability to communicate led to some of these issues – as well as Paul’s own heavy drinking, and the terrible addiction problems his first son, Scott, faced.

We’ll get into this, and more, in the sections ahead, as Paul stumbles into acting, marriage, and fatherhood, in very quick succession.

Free Beer With Every Laundry

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.

Back Home and Back to School

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.

From the Studio to the Big Screen

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.

Beyond Acting

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.

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Worum geht es in The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man?

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man (2022) is a thoughtful memoir that finds the legendary actor Paul Newman looking back at his life with a critical, introspective eye. Newman isn’t afraid to be self-deprecating as he looks back on his career, as well as his shortcomings as a husband and father.

Wer The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man lesen sollte

Movie buffs
Fans of introspective memoirs
People interested in the life of an actor

Über den Autor

Paul Newman was an award-winning actor and director, who has appeared in numerous films including The Hustler, The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Nobody’s Fool. He was also a championchip race car driver as well as a respected humanitarian who has raised nearly $1 billion for multiple charities.

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