Paul Newman: ‘We left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars’

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.

Newman was in his 60s when he made this confession, by which time he had starred in a lifetime’s worth of seminal films, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke and The Verdict. He was an instantly recognisable if reluctant celebrity, idolised for his calm manner, his piercing blue eyes and his seemingly storybook marriage to the equally accomplished Joanne Woodward. He had raised a family and held a spot on president Richard Nixon’s enemies list for his advocacy of liberal causes. He went on to drive race cars and immerse himself in philanthropy.

Yet Newman, who died in 2008, was dogged by self-doubt, perpetually questioning his choices and plagued by past mistakes. “I’m always anxious about admitting to failure,” he said. “To not being good enough, to not being right.” Despite his hesitations, he added, “I am certain that nobody can always be responsible for what other people are. You can only be responsible for who you are.”

I thought he was Superman, until my early 20s and even after that

—  Clea Newman Soderlund

Newman’s lifelong insecurity is one of the more striking themes to emerge from a posthumous memoir by the actor, titled The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man. The book, which Knopf will release on Tuesday, is surprising for the remarkable candour of its subject, one of the most accomplished and reticent actors from an era when the perpetual documentation of daily life was not a precondition for fame.

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Newman does not hold back on sensitive topics. He digs deep into his memories and reflects at length on his difficult childhood, the earlier marriage he abandoned before he wed Woodward, his excessive drinking and the loss of his son, Scott, who died from an accidental overdose of drugs and alcohol.

The vulnerability that Newman reveals in the book is astonishing even to people who knew him intimately. “I thought he was Superman, until my early 20s and even after that,” says Clea Newman Soderlund, the youngest of the actor’s five daughters. Though she was familiar with many of the stories her father shares, she says: “I definitely didn’t know how complex and how traumatising they were for him.”

He was fascinated by this idea of how people viewed him versus how he felt about himself

—  Melissa Newman

The memoir is not the result of Newman sitting down at a keyboard and typing out his personal history. The book is assembled from five years’ worth of interviews that the actor gave, between 1986 and 1991, to Stewart Stern, the screenwriter (Rebel Without a Cause) and a close friend.

Stern himself died in 2015, at a time when the interviews were presumed lost; those transcripts were only recently recovered, along with transcripts of conversations that Stern conducted with Newman’s family members (including Woodward) and collaborators such as Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill and Martin Ritt.

Their voices are also included in the book, fulfilling Newman’s desire that they buttress his accounts of events – or, when necessary, contradict his misapprehensions – and provide a fuller picture of who he was.

“He was fascinated by this idea of how people viewed him versus how he felt about himself,” says 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’.”

In late September, she spoke from the rustic abode in Westport, Connecticut, that she calls 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.

On the other side of the Aspetuck river is another family dwelling, a wood-panelled barn home whose decor is dominated by a large portrait of Newman as Buffalo Bill. The path between the two properties goes over a footbridge and past a treehouse that many years ago, Soderlund says, was where Woodward “used to go and hide from all of us when she couldn’t take it any more”.

This is a guy who is not comfortable in his own skin and who was very obsessive about things that went wrong

—  David Rosenthal

It was in a laundry room on this estate that a family friend, filmmaker and producer Emily Wachtel, found a locked cabinet containing a tranche of Stern’s interviews with Newman’s colleagues and confidants. Later, Wachtel discovered that a storage unit held the transcripts of Newman’s own interviews with Stern.

“There were these boxes that said ‘PN history,’ and I opened them, and it was like 5,000 pages,” Wachtel says. “The family hadn’t seen them.”

Sifting through the raw transcripts was a difficult task for Newman’s daughters. “I was just paralysed by his deep sadness,” Soderlund says. “That heaviness was really hard for me. I had to read them in bits and pieces.”

With the assistance of a literary agent, the Newman family sold a biographical project based on the transcripts to Knopf, and with the publisher’s help, David Rosenthal – a veteran book and magazine editor – was hired to compile the material into a memoir.

Rosenthal, who has edited works by Hunter S Thompson and Carrie Fisher, says he is used to “people who deliver their books in shopping bags” and wasn’t rattled by the prospect of starting from reams of unorganised interview pages delivered in a banker’s box.

I just smoked a joint and remembered with absolute clarity the whole map of my boyhood hometown

—  Paul Newman

Though there was some discussion of releasing the book as an oral history, Rosenthal thinks that presenting it as a memoir from Newman is more profound and powerful. “You’ve got enough of his voice to make it first person without substantially changing anything,” he says.

And the Newman who comes through in his interviews is hardly the unflappable star that audiences thought they knew. “There is a line of sadness that permeates so much of his early adulthood,” Rosenthal says. “This is a guy who is not comfortable in his own skin and who was very obsessive about things that went wrong.”

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 fetishised 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.”

Newman, who was Jewish on his father’s side, experienced anti-Semitism at school and in the American naval service during the second World War.

Joanne gave birth to a sexual creature. She taught him, she encouraged him, she delighted in the experimental. I was in pursuit of lust

—  Paul Newman

He recounts getting into a fight with a fellow sailor who called him a slur, using his wrestling skills to throw his opponent to the ground and injure his arm. “When he got off the floor, he could only move one hand,” Newman says. “The fight was called off and no one bothered me again.”

Yet his war experience endowed Newman with little maturity or personal direction – he compares it to “being in a touring company of ‘Taming of the Shrew’ going through Schenectady, Poughkeepsie and upstate New York”.

As an undergraduate at Kenyon College, he threw himself equally into drinking, chasing women and the acting work his mother encouraged him to pursue.

He quickly married Jackie Witte, a fellow drama student with whom he had three children. But something in him was not fully activated until he met Woodward in the 1953 Broadway production of William Inge’s Picnic. As Newman says: “Joanne gave birth to a sexual creature. She taught him, she encouraged him, she delighted in the experimental. I was in pursuit of lust.”

Newman’s affair with Woodward was barely concealed – “We left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars,” he says – and though he eventually divorced Witte and married Woodward, he regretted hurting the children he had with Witte and failing to explain his actions to them. “I saw myself as somewhere in the middle,” Newman says. “A little of bad, a lot of good – and I provided. But what I did just didn’t have any class.”

His astronomical ascent as an actor continued: Newman was nominated for 10 competitive Academy Awards and won for The Colour of Money in 1987. (He also received an honorary Oscar in 1986 and the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1994.)

But his life was hardly free of disappointment and tragedy. He wrestled with his drinking, a habit he knew was self-destructive but says “unlocked a lot of things I couldn’t have done without it”. And he was shattered when his son, Scott, who had led a peripatetic life in his father’s shadow and was receiving psychiatric treatment, died in 1978 at age 28.

More people know James Dean or Elizabeth Taylor. Nobody knows who my dad is

—  Melissa Newman

“I realise that there is even something grotesque in saying ‘Forgive me’,” Newman says. “The energy up there that represents that kid will just give me the finger and say, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do with that?’”

Melissa Newman says that they considered withholding her father’s reflections on Scott from the book but decided “it was time for it”.

“That is a little fraught,” she says. “But if it can serve any purpose, it’s a cautionary tale – to have people understand there is no magic potion which makes parents able to deal with a situation like that, even with all the resources in the world.”

The daughters are not entirely sure what brought an end to Newman’s interviews with Stern – “Five years of talking about yourself is a lot of time, and Dad didn’t exactly love talking about himself,” Soderlund says – nor what became of those original recordings, though they believe their father destroyed tapes and were not certain why.

Melissa Newman says her father’s will granted them permission to publish a biography of him, and the sisters felt the book provided a crucial opportunity to set the record straight about him and Woodward, who is 92 years old and has kept a private life since she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

“We just felt as though his legacy wasn’t being taken of,” Melissa Newman says. “More people know James Dean or Elizabeth Taylor. Nobody knows who my dad is.”

They also allowed some of the interview transcripts to be read in a recent documentary miniseries, The Last Movie Stars, about their parents, which was directed by Ethan Hawke and originated by Wachtel, a producer of the project.

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Soderlund says that the documentary and book were meant to be complementary; the miniseries “focused on their film work and told the love story of them through their films,” she says, while the memoir “is really focused on Dad’s inner being”.

While she expects that the book will be revelatory to many readers, Soderlund says it gave her a new perspective on her father.

“I give him a tonne of credit,” she explains. “He said: ‘I want everybody to be painfully honest.’ To read through all these interviews that your friends and family are doing, and then do all that introspection yourself, that’s pretty heavy stuff.”

Even so, Newman himself seemed to believe there were limits on how much he could truly reveal to other people.

As he says in the book, whether audiences believed he was Hud or Butch Cassidy or any other film character he played, that was all just “a shell that’s photographed on-screen, chased by the fans and garnering all the glory. While whoever is really inside me, the core, stays unexplored, uncomfortable and unknown.” – A version of this article originally appeared in The New York Times