![]() ![]() In the memoir, Newman also describes his tangled relationship with his looks-which he sometimes felt won him opportunities he wouldn’t have been afforded based on talent alone. And I’m sure most other people didn’t see him that way either. I struggled with that because I didn’t see him that way. There were parts that were hard to read, only because it was difficult to feel how hard he was on himself. “He was always striving for that elusive perfection that he saw in others but he couldn’t see in himself. But I definitely did not have any idea that he was so hard on himself,” she says. I knew how dysfunctional his relationship was with his mom. “I knew how complicated his childhood was. It would’ve been helpful for me, and, oddly, I think it would’ve been helpful for him to help me with that.”īut Clea, the youngest of Newman and Woodward’s children, was affected by those passages in particular. That struggle to find yourself as an artist-that would’ve been such a great conversation to have. “I used to cry about him all the time, even before he was gone. “I always felt there was something really fragile about him, always,” she remembers. I think he really spent his whole life trying to catch up to her in terms of just being that.” “She was all the things that he wanted to be-which is why I think he loved her and worshipped her so much. She was incapable of being anyone other than herself,” continues Melissa, pointing out how much of a contrast that was to her father, who describes himself as being painfully inhibited and shy in his memoir. She said she moved in with a guy once, redecorated his whole apartment while he was away, and painted his television set. We have wicker furniture downstairs, and it’s like, every time it chips, you can see 1970, 1960…. “My mom was sewing slipcovers and respraying furniture with paint. Melissa adds that Woodward’s interior-design pursuits extended beyond the carnal-themed. ![]() She was a wonderful, savvy woman, but it was kind of funny.” I would read certain sentences and just go, Oh, dear, Mary Jane, I’m so sorry. “My great-aunt Mary Jane typed the transcripts upstairs and it’s hysterical to think of her up there typing. Melissa says that reading her father’s risqué memories was triply surreal considering that a relative had been tasked with transcribing the original audio interviews. Anything they do here has been done a million times-if not by me then, evidently, by my parents. “They bought this house because there was a tree house. Melissa was speaking from the Westport, Connecticut home her parents purchased six decades or so ago-and that she later bought from them. “We all knew that was going to be the headline of everything, and I think it’s awesome. ![]() “And then we’re like, Oh, why not?” shrugs Melissa. In conversations with Vanity Fair this week, two of the couple’s daughters, Melissa Newman and Clea Newman Soderlund-who respectively wrote the memoir’s foreword and afterword-recalled discovering this anecdote in the thousands of pages worth of transcripts recovered in storage some years ago. Even if my kids came over, we’d go into the Fuck Hut several nights a week and just be intimate and noisy and ribald.” She had redecorated a room with a thrift-store bed and a fresh coat of paint, and proudly announced, “I call it the Fuck Hut.” Remembers Newman, “It had been done with such affection and delight. In the memoir, Newman recalls returning to the Beverly Hills home he shared with Woodward one night to find that Woodward had planned a surprise for him. On that last subject, Newman offers up a detail so wonderfully eccentric that it was immediately pull-quoted, well, everywhere-the detail, of course, being the existence of “ the Fuck Hut.” The book was compiled from a series of interviews the Oscar winner gave to his close friend (and Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter) Stewart Stern between 19, during which Newman reflected on subjects including his complicated relationship with his looks and fame, his perceived failures as a father and husband to his first wife, Jackie Witte, and his fiery passion for his second wife and creative collaborator, Joanne Woodward. ![]() Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, made a blazing debut this week, thanks to the remarkable candor of its movie-star subject. ![]()
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