Paul Newman: A Life by Shawn Levy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Fame and limelight make people look big. They are everywhere. The stories about their every step published on popular websites and social media make them seem important. Sometimes, those whose faces we regularly see flashing through the news have personalities to match their popularity. And sometimes, behind glamorous images, there is nothing but the shallow void.

Paul Newman is a rare celebrity whose personality exceeded his staggering fame and unprecedented success as a movie star. I can imagine his fans, who’ve watched all his movies and followed his life through newspapers and TV news, thinking that they knew their idol. Yet, after reading his biography, I believe that a rare person outside his personal circle – which, to stay fair, was rather wide – truly realised the depth and breadth of his extraordinary persona.

The author has done Paul Newman justice by meticulously documenting every stage of his life. Because it indeed was the remarkable life of an extraordinary man. Not a fan and only vaguely familiar with his work in movies, after reading the book, I was left with a strong impression of who Paul Newman was, not only as a star but as a man, husband, and father. With his words, the author managed to convey the essence of a person behind the public image: his aspirations, motivations, ambitions, and much more.

So many things made me admire Paul Newman that the length of the review detailing all the reasons for my admiration would be a crime against the reading community. Let me only mention in passing a few things. His serious attitude towards his acting and a pragmatic one, with a touch of self-irony, towards his exceptionally good looks. His fifty-year-long marriage. His not falling into the trap of drugs. Here, it would be fair to mention that his appreciation of beer was legendary.

The thing that I’ll let myself expand a little on is Paul Newman’s charity for seriously ill children, The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp.

An adventurous person when it came to implementing the projects based on something that mattered to him, Paul Newman came up with an idea that the world – the USA at least - deserves more than to continue with a mediocre salad dressing. The rich and famous actor was known for dressing his salad with the dressing of his own making, even in restaurants. One day, it dawned on him that he and his friends and loved ones might not be the only ones who silently suffer from the inadequacy of salad dressing served everywhere, spoiling perfectly fresh and crispy ingredients. So, enlisting a sidekick – pardon, a business partner from the pool of his closest friends, Paul Newman created a successful business venture, starting with offering the craving market a salad dressing, which was up to his high standards for this product.

You might shrug and say, “A usual story. A celebrity plasters his face on a bottle of something and adds a few more millions to his bank account.” And you’d be wrong. All the profits from the ‘salad dressing’ venture went to charity. It was how the business partners had agreed it would be before the business had taken off. It didn’t change even after Newman’s death, the actor having included a respective clause in his testament.

The enormity of the endeavour and the acute realisation of what it meant for the sick kids and their parents already brought tears to my eyes. But a story about a little girl gifting Paul Newman a bracelet made me openly cry.

Four stars and not five for “Paul Newman: A Life” by Shawn Levy not because of the story, the lack of mastery displayed by the author, or the personality of Mr Newman. I took off one star solely because of my own knowledge deficiency that forced me to jump back and forth across the book, looking for the names, titles, and places mentioned, which my memory was unable to hold. Because of this, when my concentration wasn’t at its highest, reading this book sometimes turned into a bit of a slog.

Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs are among the top three of my favourite genres, and I highly recommend this book to those who have a similar appreciation for biographical non-fiction.

P.S. My husband had been offering to watch one of the classical western movies for a while, and I remained reluctant to the idea. But reading Paul Newman’s biography did ignite my interest, and together we’ve watched “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Probably not the cup of tea for younger viewers, we enjoyed the movie immensely. Even though the filming took place in Utah, we couldn’t help noticing the similarities in the red canyon landscape with Arizona, which we visited last year.



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Paul Newman: A Life