Hollywood legend Paul Newman’s triumphs and regrets retold in posthumous memoir

Almost everybody loved Paul Newman. Except, perhaps, Paul Newman.

Joanne Woodward was devoted to him through four children and 50 years of marriage. Robert Redford was proud to call him a friend. Millions of fans admired him, and the thousands of children he treated to free vacations adored him.

Newman’s opinion of himself was more mixed.

And in his posthumous memoir, “Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” the actor comes clean. He writes about a mother he couldn’t stand and his failed first marriage. Newman talks about his drinking and the tragic death of his only son.

The book began with five years of occasional interviews conducted by his friend, screenwriter Stewart Stern. Then in 1991, for unknown reasons, the project was put aside. Only recently did Newman’s children find the transcripts – 14,000 pages worth – in a storage unit. They hired an editor to turn them into a book.

Even now, they can’t quite believe this private man left behind such a public account.

“The fact that our father ever considered the book you now hold in your hands seems completely weird to us,” writes daughter Melissa Newman. “An offering to the offspring is how he originally thought of it. That and maybe a way to ‘set the public record straight’ after being dogged most of his life by the tabloids.”

A big part of “setting the record straight,” for Newman, meant being honest about his insecurities – doubts that tortured him almost from the start.

His hard-drinking father — who ran his family’s upscale sporting-goods business in Shaker Heights, Ohio — had little time for him. Newman’s mother only saw him as something pretty to show off, like the furniture in their stately home. Newman grew up desperate for his father’s approval and squirming at his mother’s shallow compliments.

He felt like an impostor.

“I wasn’t naturally anything,” Newman recalls. “I wasn’t a lover, I wasn’t an athlete, I wasn’t a student, I wasn’t a leader… All I was interested in was girls; they were all I could think of. And I just wasn’t very successful with them.”

Newman entered the Navy in 1943, undersized, underweight, and unremarkable. Life changed as he shot up four inches, filled out and developed a lifelong taste, and remarkable capacity, for beer.

When he returned home and went off to Kenyon College, Newman made his mark.

“Paul was wild, lascivious, dangerous,” a classmate recalled. “He drank more. He screwed more. He was tough and cold – it turned on the girls. They liked him because he was the devil.”

A barroom brawl resulted in him getting kicked off the football squad. With newfound time, he joined the drama club. Finally, Newman discovered something worthwhile he was good at.

Still, he writes, “I never enjoyed acting, never enjoyed going out there and doing it. I enjoyed all the preliminary work – the detail, the observation, putting things together. Every once in a while, I’d do a scene that might come together in some unusual way and I would be astonished. But that was a tiny percentage of the time I actually spent doing it. It’s probably a reason I drank so much.”

Things began to move fast. Two hours after college graduation in 1949, Newman was on a train to Wisconsin for his first summer-stock gig. It provided room, board, and experience – but no pay.

There he fell for Jacqueline Witte, another member of the troupe. The romance blossomed quickly, but traditionally. They didn’t sleep together until their honeymoon. Their first child, Scott, arrived roughly nine months later.

By the early ‘50s, they were in New York. Newman was building a steady career on stage and TV; Jackie was home in the suburbs, taking care of three kids. Then, doing the play “Picnic” in 1953, Newman met Woodward.

The attraction wasn’t merely immediate; it was incendiary.

“We left a trail of lust all over the place,” he remembers. “Hotels and motels and public parks and bathrooms and swimming pools and ocean beaches and rumble seats and Hertz rental cars.”

Finally, in 1958, Newman divorced Witte and married Woodward. And his movie career began to take off.

“The Hustler,” “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” — each new title seemed to make his star shine a little brighter. His audience of star-struck fans grew a little larger. Well past when sex symbols usually fade, Newman continued to dazzle, even if it was not what he wanted. Doubt it? Just say his name to any woman who first saw him in the big screen.

Newman knows what brought about the change.

“It was the introduction of Joanne and her sexuality into my life,” he 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. I’m simply a creature of her invention.”

Still, there was trouble. By 1971, fed up with his drinking, Woodward came close to leaving. Newman swore off hard liquor. He continued to chug beer, of course. But the marriage survived. And Newman increasingly found a different kind of escape – racing cars.

His firstborn wasn’t so lucky.

Later, Newman would acknowledge he had made the same mistakes his father had – being distant or demanding. And his son Scott would relive some of Newman’s struggles – trying to find his place, self-medicating to dull the pain. Except in Scott’s case, it wasn’t booze but hard drugs.

He died of an overdose in 1978.

“The same thing that happened to Scott certainly could have happened to me,” Newman writes. “He was really very much like me; he didn’t get it, either. He didn’t know how much danger he was in, and by the time he got it, it was too late.”

How do you survive the death of a child? Newman’s answer was to keep working and make a difference.

He began a non-profit dedicated to drug prevention. He started the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, providing free vacations to seriously ill children. Profits from a string of Newman’s Own food products went to that charity and others.

It’s at this point that the memoir begins to get sketchy. There’s little here about Newman’s terrific, late-career work in “The Color of Money” or the “The Verdict.” Since it concludes in 1991, the memoir has nothing about the couple’s declining years.

Woodward, 92, has struggled with Alzheimer’s since 2007; Newman died in 2008 at 83.

Even without details about the later years, the memoir still offers a bittersweet portrait of the man – a man still trying to understand himself.

“I always had the sense I cater to appearances, that I drink too much, that I don’t know how to define myself, so that I can’t define my children either – all of these negatives in my life,” he writes. “The damage for me has come when I’ve realized what people were clamoring for was not me. It was characters invented by writers. It was the wit and ability of the authors, the wit and the ability of the people who did the exploitation and selling, that had the appeal…

“Whoever is really inside me, the core, stays unexplored, uncomfortable and alone.”