Several years before he died in 2008, Paul Newman commissioned his best friend to interview actors and directors he worked with, his friends, his children, his first wife, his psychiatrist, and Joanne Woodward, to create an oral history of his life. After hearing and reading what others said about him, Newman then dictated his own version of his life.
Newman at his best ... The end product...is twice the book one could have dared to hope for, a narrative that is astute, introspective and surprisingly graceful ... When we meet our heroes on the page, we want them to have something thoughtful to say—to make good on the admiration their outsize performances have won. Newman always seemed likely to pass that test, with his self-aware persona, storied marriage and generous charitable activities. Still, to see it come true in this rich book somehow imbues his characters’ pain and joy with fresh technicolor.
An odd duck of a book — welcome, but odd ... Is The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man merely a supplement to The Last Movie Stars? For readers who have watched the series, the book can’t help but suffer in comparison for not being able to include glorious clip after glorious clip of Newman in action across his lengthy filmography ... The memoir is necessarily incomplete, even speculative—a found object of sorts that has been carefully shaded and massaged into a facsimile of what Newman might have intended if he hadn’t turned his back on the whole thing. However grateful one is to have it—and it’s not pretending to be a smoothly polished work—it’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster ... Don’t let that scare you: there is much to cherish here. The book is in Newman’s voice, with occasional interjections from the interviews with Woodward and others. It’s a familiar voice: genial but shrewd, self-deprecating but resolute ... Emotionally cohesive and moving ... Some passages, such as Newman’s account of his mother’s smothering but narcissistic love, have the quality of revelation turned rote ... Don’t let that scare you, either. Some tidbits of decent gossip have managed to lodge between these covers.
The show is a lot more satisfying than the book ... The auto-da-fé at the town dump seems a pretty clear indication that Newman did not want a memoir. But now he has one. And he obviously had no say about what got put into it ... Even though the memoir was put together by friends and family, it has a slightly diminishing effect ... Newman was self-deprecating, well past the point of modesty. He was self-deprecating about his self-deprecation. It can grow a little monotonous ... There’s got to be more to Paul Newman than this. It seems that most people who knew Newman thought that there was. In the memoir, the juxtaposition of their testimonies with Newman’s self-analysis produces a sort of cognitive dissonance.
