Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: Classic Romance for History, Truth on Screen

Paul Newman is considered to be one of the great sex symbols of all time, but in his posthumous memoir, the actor admitted that women didn't always think so highly of him. In the mid-'80s, the legendary actor began compiling an oral history about his life and career, conducting interviews with friends, family, and himself. Those long-last recordings were eventually recovered and compiled in a new book, The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man: A Memoir, due out later this month (October, 27). Newman examines his relationship to his own sex-symbol status and his feeling that, despite being viewed as a heartthrob by women everywhere thanks to films like The Long Hot Summer, Cool Hand Luke, The Hustler, and The Sting he didn't actually feel sexy until he met his wife, Joanne Woodward. He explained to Stewart Stern: “Joanne gave birth to a sexual creature. We left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars.” The Oscar winner goes on to explain how insecure he was growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, especially when it came to girls. Newman was small as an adolescent so he had to get permission to play on the high school football team, an experience that shook his self-esteem. His confidence was low by then, especially around girls. 

"I felt like a goodman freak," he admitted. “Girls thought I was a joke. A happy buffoon,” he said. But everything changed once he met Joanne Woodward. He explained, “I went from being not much of a sexual threat to something else entirely.” Newman and Woodward first met in 1953 when they were both understudies in the Broadway play Picnic. The blue-eyed star was married at the time to his first wife, Jackie Witte, with whom he had three young kids, Scott, Susan, and Stephanie. But he was unable to deny his attraction to Woodward and the pair began a tumultuous affair that he describes as "brutal in my detachment from my family." Eventually, he would divorce Witte in 1958 and quickly wed Woodward. In the memoir, he describes returning to their new Beverly Hills home one night to discover that she had fixed up a room off the master bedroom with a double bed she bought from a thrift shop and a fresh coat of paint. “'I call it the Fuck Hut,' she said proudly. It had been done with such affection and delight. Even if my kids came over, we'd go into the Fuck Hut several nights a week and just be intimate there,” Newman wrote. The couple would go on to have three daughters of their own, Nell, Melissa, and Clea, and move to Westport, Connecticut. 

But while their romance was one for the history books, Newman and Woodward still faced plenty of ups and downs in their relationship, often due to the actor's heavy drinking. He recalls in the book, “Joanne and I still drive each other crazy in different ways. But all the misdemeanors and difficulties have kind of evened themselves out over the years.” Their daughter Clea also told the outlet that it's true her parents “fought and it could be dramatic, but they also fought really hard to stay together. They didn't walk. There were times it was pretty close but they worked hard at it. Ultimately they came together.” She added that this memoir gives her late father the opportunity to let others see him how he saw himself. Now 92, Woodward, who has Alzheimer's, lives quietly at home on the property they long shared. But their love story comes alive once again in the new book. As well as the actor's humor, his intellect and his drive to do good in the world, especially with his philanthropic work, launching a network of camps for seriously ill children, which he considered his greatest legacy. Source: vanityfair.com

Perhaps to compensate for being uncoordinated for the school sports teams, Paul Newman developed a growing interest in theater. At Malvern Elementary School, Paul played the role of the organ grinder in a class play. Partially to offset his natural reticence, he hammed it up, singing in mock Italian. He later admitted, “I made up in volume what I lacked in tone.” But if you are going to mark his big theatrical debut, it was at the age of seven, as the court jester in The Travails of Robin Hood. His uncle Joe even had written a song for him, but Paul felt unnerved, a sensation he would continue to feel throughout his professional career. Luckily, discomfort onstage wasn’t reason enough to end a budding theatrical career—in fact, it may have been a motivating force. Paul Newman rarely backed down from a challenge. At the age of 11, his mother enrolled Paul in the Curtain Pullers, a children’s program at the Cleveland Play House. Famous alumni of the program include Joel Grey (who later went on to star in Cabaret on stage and screen), Eleanor Parker (famous screen actress who appeared in The Sound of Music), and Jack Weston (Dirty Dancing). 

Paul Newman seemed more interested in character roles at first. He didn’t see himself as the romantic leading man, despite the fact that even as a child, he was extraordinarily good looking. As his mother commented to a reporter in 1959, “Paul was such a beautiful little boy. In a way, it was a shame to waste so much beauty on a boy.” But there was also a tension within the household about Paul’s growing participation in theater. Paul remembers that his mother was supportive of his work on stage, but his father considered it stargazing and definitely not the life he envisioned for his younger son. After his Navy training, he was assigned to the war in the Pacific, stationed at Eniwetok, Guam, Okinawa, and Saipan. Newman’s luck was in full force in May 1945 when his crew was ordered to practice landings on the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill. But his pilot developed an earache, and so another crew was sent in their place. A few days later, two kamikaze pilots attacked the Bunker Hill, killing nearly 400 sailors, including every member of Newman’s squadron. “When you miss something like that because your pilot happened to have an earache, wow!” He was about 50 miles away from Hiroshima, on the aircraft carrier Hollandia, when, on August 7, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped. 

Newman admitted that he didn’t fully understand the ramifications of the bombing. As an adult, however, Paul Newman became an outspoken activist against nuclear proliferation. He was honorably discharged from the Navy on January 21, 1946, just five days before his 21st birthday. He received five honors for his war experience: a Navy Combat Action Ribbon, the American Area Campaign Medal, the Asian Pacific Campaign Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. He had also suffered his first real heartbreak. He had been “very attached,” as he described it, to a young woman in his hometown from Ohio. Midway through his time in service, she dumped him. Of course, one wonders how her life would have been different had she married the young ex-marine from Shaker Heights. Paul Newman returned home and applied to Kenyon College. At Ohio University, he explained, he had been “much more interested in the ladies, than I was in my studies.” Despite his frustration with the frenetic pace of repertory theater, Paul took a job with the Woodstock Players, a repertory company located in Woodstock, Illinois. 

In Wisconsin, Newman had met Jacqueline (Jackie) Emily Witte, an aspiring actress. She followed him to Woodstock and, on December 27, 1949, became the first Mrs. Paul Newman. Paul was 24; Jackie was only 19. She hadn’t yet finished college and thought she was pregnant. Art Newman Jr. was his brother’s best man. But repertory work wouldn’t make anyone wealthy. The couple settled in rented rooms and a shared bathroom (for $10 a month). As the winter season of the company ended, Paul took a job at a local farm, stacking corn in the field. He was looking for another summer stock job when he got a call that would change his life: his father was dying. Jackie, who was pregnant, and Paul immediately left for Cleveland. On Thursday, May 11, 1950, Art Sr. died. The funeral was held the following Sunday, Mother’s Day. Paul, as expected, joined the family business. It was the least he could do to make up for what he felt was the huge disappointment he had been in his father’s eyes. 

As Newman sadly explained many years later: “One of the great anguishes of my life is that he didn’t see my success. He thought I was a ne’er-do-well.” Later on, he was blunt about his decision making: “I was going to Yale as a safety net.” Paul spoke honestly about his ambition. “I had no stars in my eyes or aspirations to be a Broadway actor, but I did want to be in some part of the theater, and a master’s degree always protects you. You can teach at Kenyon, which I would have loved to have done.” 

In 1990, in an interview with the New York Times about their joint movie Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Joanne Woodward explained: “Very often you have to work with someone you don’t know, and part of truth on screen is having the truth of a relationship and being comfortable with someone. It’s very hard to manufacture. If you’ve never met someone and you have to be intimate with them, and I don’t just mean sexual intimacy but comfortable touching somebody or interrupting their sentences, and that’s built in if you are married to somebody. All the history you would have to work on is all just there.” —Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Shawn Levy