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Book Review: Paul Newman: A Life, 2009, Shawn Levy, Harmony Books
Despite not having interviewed Paul Newman or his family; pop culture historian Shawn Levy constructs a creditable portrait using all the sources available to him.
Every "boomer" kid dreamed of being Paul Newman, the Oscar-winning actor with his iconic blue eyes, who climbed to the highest realm of the Hollywood pantheon by playing charming loners, renegades, flawed heroes and anti-heroes, in such classic films as Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Slapshot, The Verdict, The Color of Money, Nobody's Fool and Road to Perdition. However, Newman was somewhat of a misfit: the big box-office superstar who fancied himself an actor above all, the sex-symbol married to the same woman for 50 years, who became a leading philanthropist, giving millions away. Levy gives us a detailed backstage view of the actor's life, including his life’s greatest tragedy: his son's death from a drug overdose.
Levy’s primary focus is on Newman the actor. Newman studied method acting (an actor’s use of inner emotions to create character). which arrived in New York in the early 1950s, and both would have a major impact on film and theater. Levy points out that while Newman’s athletic physique and blue eyes opened doors for him; but his first performances, were awkward and stiff. His wife Joanne Woodward, recalling her first impressions of his work on the play Picnic “I thought he was terrible”: he was.” Just a pretty face.”
Newman appeared in several Broadway productions before his first, and perhaps worst, picture the biblical epic The Sliver Chalice, in which he played a Greek artist who designed the Holy Grail. The film was so embarrassing to the actor that he ran newspaper ads when it was scheduled to appear on TV urging people not to watch.
Levy chronicles Newman’s gradual ascendance into a cultural icon. Newman, Levy says, begins as “an ironist, a rascal, a scamp,” then, finally, “a crusty old customer.” Newman became the “actor laureate”, of the generation that came to power after World War II.
The author says of his subject “he wasn’t the greatest American actor, and he was not even the greatest actor of his own vintage. But he was arguably the most American actor, the fellow whose roles and accumulated persona best captured the tenor of his times and his people.”
Levy gives Newman many hats: Husband; Father; Actor; movie star; sex symbol; entrepreneur; philanthropist; film director; activist; champion driver; championship team owner; Oscar Winner; national treasure.
Later in life Newman took great pleasure in his many charitable organizations, in particular his Hole in the Wall Camps for seriously ill children. He said, "If I'm going to leave a legacy, it's not going to be my films or anything I do politically," he said. "It's going to be these camps."
The camps are indeed a great legacy; but as long as the art of the cinema is celebrated Paul Newman's considerable body of high quality work spanning fifty years will continue to define our age to future generations. He will take his place among the immortals of the silver screen, the likes of: Astaire, Grant, Gable, Tracy, Cagney, Stewart, Cooper, Bogart and Wayne,
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