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.
It documents his chaotic early life in Ohio as the son of an overbearing, unpredictable mother and a “dismissive, disinterested” father. The household “contained the sounds of constant warfare” as his parents fought viciously. At college, he went wild, drinking and partying. There was a stint in the navy, after which he worked in provincial theatre where he met and married his first wife, Jackie Witte, to whom he was serially unfaithful. Their first son, Scott, whom Newman admits to having neglected, died aged 28 from a drug overdose. His second marriage, to the actor Joanne Woodward, whom he met as his career was taking off, brought about his transformation into “a sexual creature”; the couple “left a trail of lust” in public parks, swimming pools, rental cars and at home in a place they christened their “fuck hut”.
Actor Jeff Daniels reads Newman’s recollections, capturing his insecurity, melancholy introspection and bracing honesty. Meanwhile, his daughters Melissa and Clea share anecdotes of this once private man who, after years of tabloid intrusion, had, in talking to Stern, decided to “set the record straight” and reveal the man behind the screen idol.
Further listening
My Father’s House
Joseph O’Connor, Penguin Audio, 11 hr 17min
A cast including Barry Barnes and Stephen Hogan narrates the first in O’Connor’s Rome Escape Line trilogy in which a Vatican City priest hides Italian Jews from the Nazis.
The Salt Path
Raynor Winn, Penguin Audio, 9hr 1min
The Landlines author reads her award-winning memoir about the long coastal walk undertaken with her husband after they lose their home.
