A painfully revealing memoir, taken from transcripts of reminiscences Newman recorded in the 1980s, lays bare a candid, complicated star
Movie stars, bemused by their own magnified faces, don’t usually have much interest in self-analysis. Paul Newman turns out to be the ruthlessly candid exception. In the late 1980s, between beery binges, Newman recorded endless hours of reminiscences, trying finally to understand the insecure, inadequate stranger who skulked behind his handsome facade. Probably alarmed by what he’d revealed, he later destroyed the tapes. But after his death in 2008, 14,000 pages of transcripts were discovered in his musty Connecticut basement and in a storage locker; these have now been cut and pasted into an autobiography, supplemented by contributions from colleagues and family members. The result is startling: Narcissus breaks the mirror, leaving only some cruelly jagged shards.
In the early 1950s, Newman seemed the most unthreatening of Hollywood’s angry young men – less eruptive than Marlon Brando, less twitchy than Montgomery Clift, less surly than James Dean. Tempering the fury unleashed by the others, he played a redeemed hoodlum in Somebody Up There Likes Me and an introverted outlaw in The Left Handed Gun. Eventually, as a wise-cracking robber in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and a playful gambler in The Sting, he settled down to be wry and irresistibly charming. But his book hardly mentions roles like these; instead, he ridicules “this ******* movie star with blue eyes cast as a half-Apache in Hombre”. Overcome by a sense of unworthiness that festers into self-contempt, he calls himself “that decorative little ****”, a merely ornamental creature with an empty centre.
Be First to Comment