For much of Paul Newman’s life, interviewers and biographers struggled to get to grips with him. Everyone could agree that he had a face that belonged on an ancient coin and arresting pale blue eyes, but it was not quite clear what lay beyond them.
The writer and editor Peter Gethers describes himself as a “Newman fanatic”, yet he had little sense of the actor beyond his work, other than that he loved his wife and turned out a very popular line of salad dressing. Until his death in 2008, aged 83, Newman had remained a private and distant man.
Then Gethers got a telephone call from a literary agent representing Newman’s family. In a basement at their home in Connecticut his daughters had discovered a sprawling oral history project begun by one of Newman’s closest friends, featuring the actor talking bluntly about his life.
Gethers, who was asked to edit it into a memoir, to be published next year, was astonished when he saw the pages. “It’s transcripts, but it reads as if he sat at his desk and wrote this as a narrative. I was surprised at how open he was about his drinking problem. He’s very honest about not being a good husband to his first wife. He recalls things that don’t put him in a great light but he doesn’t hold back.”
Newman describes his childhood in a large house in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where his parents owned a department store. In Newman’s telling, “his relationship with his parents was disturbing and you can see how it shaped his insecurities”, Gethers said.
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“And then some of it is just really funny. One of the things I thought was interesting, and he’s both very honest and funny about it, is that he’s half Jewish. He had trouble coming to grips with that when he was young and then fully embraced his Jewish identity.”
The oral history project was begun in the 1980s by the screenwriter Stewart Stern, Newman’s close friend. Stern interviewed friends, Newman’s first wife, Jacqueline Witte, and a host of actors and directors who worked with him. He then persuaded Newman to go on tape himself. The actor told Stern that he wanted to set the record straight because there were so many unsolicited biographies that “the record now has no bearing on truth at all”.
The project had been completed about ten years before Newman died. Stern died in 2015. Gethers said Newman’s family had found the transcripts “in their basement in a filing cabinet, not that long ago”. They included 10,000 pages featuring others talking about the actor and several hundred of Newman talking. “Stern peppered him with questions about facts, about his psychology and history,” he said. Hundreds more pages of Newman’s own narrative were later found in a storage unit off the family property.
Gethers, 67, had to set out his credentials for the family. “I told his daughters I spent a chunk of my high school years playing pool and trying to pretend I was Newman in The Hustler,” he said. Gethers’s father, a screenwriter, had written the script for one of Newman’s first TV roles and Gethers himself was friends with William Goldman, who wrote one of Newman’s most famous films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The memoir, which was going to be half Newman, half others talking about him, became 90 per cent Newman, Gethers said. The actor spoke candidly about feeling inferior to Marlon Brando and James Dean and gave an intimate insight into his relationships.
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His family were convinced that he would want his words published. According to Gethers, one of the daughters said: “It showed our father to be a much better person as an old person than as a young person. We think that’s a really valuable story to show and tell.”
Lives after death
In the four years before he died in 1910, Mark Twain dictated a memoir to a stenographer with instructions for it to be published a century after his death. “I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue for good reasons,” he said. “When a man is writing a book dealing with the privacies of his life — a book which is to be read while he is still alive — he shirks from speaking his whole frank mind.”
Agatha Christie began work on a memoir when she was 60. At the age of 75 she stopped work on the project. “As far as life is concerned, that is all there is to say,” she wrote. “I live now on borrowed time.” She lived another decade and her autobiography was published two years after her death.
In the two years before his assassination, Malcolm X gave a series of interviews to the journalist Alex Haley. Months after his death it was published. “He was the most electric personality I have ever met, and I still can’t quite conceive him dead,” Haley wrote in its epilogue.
