Becoming Paul Newman

Who the actor was and who he wanted to be.

- By Louis Menand

Is Paul Newman's memoir, "The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man" (Knopf), really Paul Newman's (Knopf), really Paul Newman’s memoir? As best I can piece together the story, in 1986, the year he turned sixty-one, Newman sat down with an old friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, and began recording on a cassette player material for an autobiography.

This continued for several years, during which Stern also interviewed some of Newman’s buddies from college and the Navy, his two wives, his brother and other members of his family, friends and show-business colleagues, including screenwriters, directors, producers, agents, and actors—pretty much everyone he could find whod had some relationship to Newman. By 1991, Stern had recorded more than a hundred interviews. Then Newman asked him to stop. In 1998, Newman took the cassettes to the dump and burned them all.

Newman died, of cancer, in 2008. About ten years later, some of his children he had six altogether; his only son died in 1978) approached Ethan Hawke to discuss making a documentary. Hawke learned that Stern who died in 2015) had had transcripts of the tapes made—maybe Stern had worried that Newman might destroy them— and he used the transcripts to put together a six-part series on the lives and careers of Newman and his second wife, the actress Joanne Woodward. It’s called The Last Movie Stars,” and it aired this summer on HBO Max. Meanwhile, the transcripts were edited by David Rosenthal, and made into the book that Knopf has just published.