On Bookshelves: Paul Newman: A Life

For the better part of 83 years, Paul Newman made pretty much everything look easy. The iconic roles, the powerful auto-racing interests, the staggering philanthropy, and a half-century of marriage against all Hollywood odds are just the obvious successes, and Paul Newman: A Life (Harmony Books, 496 pp.), Shawn Levy's sweeping new biography of the actor, doesn't necessarily contradict that conventional wisdom. But what it reveals about Newman -- or, more specifically, what it reminds us of -- points out the far more mixed fortunes of one of America's greatest movie stars.

After all, Levy writes, Newman's biggest life influence may have been his luck. Not that it always worked in the actor's favor; Academy voters passed him over seven times in 25 years (including a producing nod for his 1967 Best Picture nominee Rachel, Rachel), and no tragedy affected him more than the death of his troubled son Scott from a drug overdose in 1978. Fans crowded and clamored to stand for mere seconds in the gaze of his magnetic blue eyes. It was all more than Newman wanted or could stand in some cases, finally declining to attend or even watch the Oscars by the time he was finally recognized in 1986 for reprising his pool shark Eddie Felson in The Color of Money.

Yet therein you can sense the real texture of his blessings -- those of a man so inseparable from his work that he could successfully return to a character like the pool shark Eddie Felson after a quarter-century away. As Levy makes clear through his largely episodic chronology, Newman wasn't an icon of range so much as inhabitance. For better or worse, it was the only advantage he had while coming up through Kenyon College and, later, the Actors Studio (to which Newman was admitted accidentally) and the early-'50s theater scene in New York. "It was a very interesting performance," his Picnic director Josh Logan told him after Newman filled in eight performances for the lead Ralph Meeker, "but you don't carry any sexual threat at all." Challenges like that motivated years' worth of refinement into the searing young men of The Long, Hot Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Harper and Cool Hand Luke.

Except that by that time Newman was already in his 40s, the father of six children, divorced once, and remarried shortly thereafter to Joanne Woodward. A Life candidly illuminates the difficulty of being a Newman, particularly during this late-'60s period. Woodward, who costarred in her husband's racing melodrama Winning, could barely stand to watch him fly around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The adulation from oversexed female fans in the grandstand ("Please Paul, slow down!") and everywhere else, really, tormented Woodward and Newman's five daughters. Finally, on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Newman was said to be enmeshed in a torrid affair with a tell-all journalist who called him "a square" who was "always drunk."

Neither Newman nor Woodward ever actively refuted the allegations (both declined to be interviewed by Levy), and rarely, except perhaps in the case of Newman kicking whiskey while directing Sometimes a Great Notion, did either star acknowledge his prodigious booze intake. His problem acquired its deepest resonance with Scott's death, an incident that Newman was powerless to stop so long as he clutched a beer in his hand. Which was a lot, by Levy's estimation, making his film sets three-ring circuses of practical jokes (filling Robert Altman's trailer with hundreds of live chickens on Buffalo Bill an the Indians) and genuinely familial collaborations that underwrote much of the success of Cool Hand Luke, Slap Shot and even his directorial debut Rachel, Rachel.

Perhaps influenced by that rapport, Levy's critical chops wield their primary power when discussing those films. His reportorial skill exceeds even those, rebuilding Newman's affluent Ohio upbringing from scratch and finely detailing the actor's raw political passions (he was very proud of his high rank on Richard Nixon's enemies list). But the actor's success as a semi-pro auto racer and team owner virtually cowers in the shadow of the Newman's Own phenomenon, his philanthropic food enterprise whose meteoric rise represents a case study as much as a biography segment. It's reach, in fact, may very well challenge Newman's films for ownership of his legacy, if the attention paid here is any indication.

Newman's death last November from lung cancer coincided with the editing of Levy's book, and the author's relatively quick summation of that decline feels dissonant with the rich context preceding it. Maybe it was deadline, or lack of hard information. Maybe it was Levy's reluctance to live with a frail subject after all those years in much livelier company. Or maybe, taking after his profoundly gifted subject, Levy just makes "goodbye" look easy. I'd lean toward the latter; A Life does a lot of that. RATING (out of 10): 8.5