The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir

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An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. 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.

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. The man with the fifty year marriage, the man of many and successful movies, the man who created celebrity philanthropy, the man who designed camps for terminally ill kids…was a closed book, a cypher, a functional alcoholic whose epic marriage was set by his cheating on his first wife for years with Joanne Woodward. Read by Jeff Daniels, Melissa Newman, Clea Newman Soderlund, Ari Fliakos, January LaVoy, John Rubinstein and Emily Wachtel

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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. I think anyone who enjoys reading about complex people will enjoy this book. You don't need to know anything about Paul Newman or even be interested in Hollywood. This book isn't a Hollywood book, it's a deeply personal book about man who never believed his own hype. What’s an insecure showoff to do? “Acting gave me a sanctuary where I was able to create emotions without being penalized for having them,” Newman writes. Yet he also says he never really liked the craft but discovered that he was good at it, at least in the eyes of others, and worked hard to make it a career. I have been a huge fan of Paul Newman since I saw my first of his movies, The Long Hot Summer, which also happened to feature his wife Joanne Woodward. Those baby blues led to my major infatuation on my part and even to this day, I consider Paul Newman to be a celebrity crush. When I heard a posthumous memoir was created from his writing and interviews, I knew I needed to get my hands on it. It would make my life a lot easier if whenever someone stopped me on the street and asked, “Ooh, let me take your picture,” I said OK. But that would draw another 12 people over, and that would draw some more people, and you stand there signing autographs while politely asking them about their mother and father.

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.” When Joanne and I went to Paris to shoot a few scenes of Mr. and Mrs. Bridge there were photographers at the airport, and Joanne said to me: “Don’t be a jerk. Pose for them and then they’ll leave us alone.” So you agree to stand there and smile for a minute or two, hold your wife’s arm, etc. and you tell them, “I’ll see you, goodbye.” Then you walk to your car and about two-thirds of them follow and do exactly what you thought you were getting away from. They honor nothing, and they even chase the car. 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.

Success!

Paul Newman is also candid about his own alcohol addiction and the abandonment of his children from his first marriage, but he seems to have pulled it together after Scott's death, devoting more time to his philanthropic endeavors (yep, I've got a bottle or two of Newman's Own salad dressing in my fridge), his passion for auto racing, and his family. And still his acting roles just seemed to get better as he aged ( The Color of Money, The Verdict)... The Last Movie Stars". Сериал, посветен на въпроса, как може да си звезда, и все пак да останеш женен за една и съща жена 50 години, да преживееш самоубийството на сина си, да участваш в движението за граждански права на Лутър Кинг, да дариш милиони за грижа за болни деца и наркомани като насмешливо сложиш лика си върху домашен сос из супермаркетите и същевременно живееш на ръба като автомобилен състезател. Flash forward to around 1982. By then, I was deeply involved in car racing, truly loving that it was a world away from the film business and Hollywood. 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