Those eyes.
Who wouldn’t have had a charmed life with the endowment of such preternatural baby blues? And the metabolism of a 15-year- old boy, the superb physical coordination, the well-adjusted childhood and the series of fortunate breaks? Even the beneficiary himself had a name for it: “Newman’s Luck.”
From the moment he was born, into a prosperous Cleveland family in 1925, until he died at age 83 last September, Paul Newman personified that combination of congenital superiority, entitlement, modesty and beneficence that defined his era’s most cherished ideals about America itself.
For decades, he was probably the single best reason to go to the movies, from “Somebody Up There Likes Me” to “The Road to Perdition” (and let’s not forget his gruff valedictory providing voice talent in the animated movie “Cars”).
Newman embodied the Platonic ideal of the Hollywood movie star, combining heart-stopping good looks with genuine talent and working continually at his craft when he could easily have coasted.
But he found meaning in life far away from the screen: in Connecticut with his wife and six kids, on the race track, at camps he founded for terminally ill children and, relatively late in life, in a salad-dressing business that started as a lark but winded up being — what else? — stupendously successful.
He was, in short, one hell of a guy. And Shawn Levy’s absorbing, affectionate portrait manages to bring him back to us, if only cursorily.
As Levy, a film critic for the Portland Oregonian, readily admits in the book’s acknowledgments, he never spoke with Newman. He was forced to make do with interviews Newman had conducted with other reporters over the years, rearranging them in chronological order and constructing a grand unified narrative in the actor’s own voice. Combining that with his own reporting and interjecting his own critical analyses of Newman’s screen persona, Levy has respectfully and respectably summed up Newman as a man in full.
By his own lights, that man was blessed with unusual good fortune. But occasionally even Newman’s Luck gave out.
Levy reminds readers that Newman’s long and loving marriage to Joanne Woodward was the result of an affair during his first marriage, which had produced three children. (Even his marriage to Woodward endured at least one unbecoming instance of Newman’s infidelity.) He had a difficult relationship with his only son, Scott, who in 1978 died of an accidental drug overdose.
And, in what will perhaps come as the biggest surprise to readers, Newman himself was a devoted drinker. Although he eventually gave up the hard stuff, he continued to pound down several beers a day, somehow never developing the gut to show for it.
That, pretty much, covers the bad news. The rest of “Paul Newman: A Life” reads as a virtually uninterrupted series of golden moments and gallantry.
Fans of Newman’s screen work may want to skip Levy’s detailed chronicle of his subject’s car-racing career in places like Atlanta and Daytona and Lime Rock, Conn., just as readers interested in his political activism — which encompassed campaigns for Eugene McCarthy, Pete McCloskey and Ned Lamont — may not especially care about whom he was up against each of the 10 times he was nominated for an Oscar. (He finally won in 1987, for “The Color of Money.”)
If the book occasionally feels rote in its retelling of Newman’s accomplishments, it still presents a dutifully comprehensive record that, put together in one place, qualifies as astonishing in its consistency and level of achievement.
Levy is most astute when he steps back to consider how Newman continually deployed his screen image to subvert his native appeal. As Fast Eddie Felson, Chance Wayne and Hud Bannon, he came to represent the youthful rebelliousness and anti-authoritarianism that the 1960s were all about.
“The twist was that Newman played not kids but grown-ups,” Levy writes, “more specifically, grown-ups who hadn’t yet outgrown juvenile impulses, urges, and flaws and might never do so.”
Much later, in films like “The Verdict” and “Nobody’s Fool,” he played rough when he could have settled into a far more unthreatening dotage in more anodyne fare.
It’s tempting to think that Newman’s Luck was just that: his alone, unattainable for mere mortals. But “Paul Newman: A Life” leaves readers with a surprisingly cheering and inspiring message. If the rest of us can’t aspire to having Newman’s life, we can at least take inspiration from the way he lived his. We can play the cards we’re dealt — with guts, grace and generosity.
NONFICTION
Paul Newman A Life
by Shawn Levy
$29.99
