Head Over Heels: Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward, David Brooks on Marriage

Their love story is the stuff of Hollywood legend. Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman became not only movie stars and stage actors, but also artistic collaborators, political activists, and philanthropists whose legacies are expansive and enduringly modern. This visually immersive oversize book chronicles their romance through the photographs of an impressive list of contributors, including: Richard Avedon, Sid Avery, Ralph Crane, Bruce Davidson, John Engstead, Leo Fuchs, Milton H. Greene, Philippe Halsman, John R. Hamilton, Leonard McCombe, Gordon Parks, Sanford Roth, Roy Schatt, Lawrence Schiller, Sam Shaw, Bradley Smith, Stewart Stern and David Sutton. These striking images—many rare and some never before published—are accompanied by snapshots, letters, handwritten notes, and family treasures. Together they beautifully illuminate the connection between two complex, passionate artists who opened their hearts and minds to each other for over half a century. This book is an homage to the possibility and power of love. Source: amazon.com

Ethan Hawke: We live in a scandal-obsessed society. Paul and Joanne worked very hard to avoid a public scandal. That humanness of their story is really beautiful. Paul is a guy who comes back from the war, goes into summer stock, falls in love with the first woman he meets, marries her 18 months later, and then they’ve got two kids by the time he’s 24. That’s a lot of pressure on a young couple who didn’t really know each other. And then he meets Joanne Woodward, the love of his life. What’s he supposed to do, live a quiet life of desperation so as not to hurt his children? It’s a terrible choice to have to make. Paul and Joanne followed their love. And they worked really hard at it, something that we can learn from. It’s interesting, we think of Paul Newman as this really handsome stud with these gorgeous blue eyes, but he didn’t think about himself that way. He always thought of himself as being kind of awkward and somehow uncomfortable with his physicality. Joanne was the one who was more comfortable, and Paul said it was Joanne who turned him into this great sex symbol. Even into their 70s, people who knew them said that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

"To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career" (August, 17, 2023), article by David Brooks: Many people have shifted the way they conceive of marriage. To use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s language, they no longer view it as the “cornerstone” of their life; they view it as the “capstone”—something to enter into after they’ve successfully established themselves as adults. Partly as a result of these attitudes, there is less marriage in America today. My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy. Please use your youthful years as a chance to have romantic relationships, so you’ll have some practice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to marry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the masters. This is not just softhearted sentimentality I’m offering. There are mountains of evidence to show that intimate relationships, not career, are at the core of life, and those intimate relationships will have a downstream effect on everything else you do.

Last month, for example, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was “the most important differentiator” between happy and unhappy people. Married people are 30 points happier than the unmarried. Income contributes to happiness, too, but not as much. As Wilcox writes in his vitally important forthcoming book, “Get Married”: “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America. Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared to peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.” “When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.” Economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell studied two groups of adults over time, some who married and some who didn’t. 

They found that marriage caused higher levels of life satisfaction, especially in middle age, when adults’ average level of satisfaction tends to be at its lowest. It wasn’t only the traits people brought into the marriage; marriage itself had positive effects. We could do a lot to raise the marriage rate by increasing wages—financial precarity inhibits marriage. But as a culture, we could improve our national happiness levels by making sure people focus most on what is primary—marriage and intimate relationships—and not on what is important but secondary—their career. My view is that sex is more explicit everywhere barring real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious by waiting longer to have sex and having fewer partners. I see the so-called culture war as nearly over, because today's young people seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right. Source: www.nytimes.com