Paul Newman Read Online Free PDF

a landmark, and he was also something of an eccentric, once crossing the United States on a motorcycle in a barnstorming concert tour.
    * A version of this coup is credited to a character in the 1984 film
Harry & Son
, which Paul Newman cowrote and directed.
    * The Newman boys received no formal religious instruction after grade school, and later on Paul would come more or less to see himself as an areligious Jew. He was so out of touch with the faith, though, that he was once caught by a journalist declaring frustration at not being able to reach anybody in the movie business on the phone—only to learn to his surprise that it was, in fact, Yom Kippur.

I N THE SUMMER OF 1946, TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD NAVY VETERAN Paul Newman handwrote an application to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Asked to provide a short autobiography, he began, “My life from the beginning has been uneventful and sheltered, my environment always clean and pleasant. My father is a self-made man with a remarkable fund of knowledge at his disposal, my mother is understanding and intelligent.”
    And indeed he had no reason not to be satisfied with his situation. The success of Newman-Stern meant that the family had all they could want in the way of clothes, furniture, food. Theresa didn’t have to work outside the home, and she had live-in domestic help in the person of Ruth Bush, a teenage housemaid originally from Pennsylvania. There was a membership at the Oakwood Club in Cleveland Heights, and Theresa eagerly attended the road-show plays staged at the Hanna Theater in downtown Cleveland. The mailman regularly delivered
Fortune, Time, Life
, and
Reader’s Digest.
In the summertime the boys attended a camp in Michigan. The family traveled to Colorado, Florida, Quebec, and Chicago, where they dined in the famed Pump Room. (“This was
the
place then,” Paul remembered on a later visit, “one of the legends.”)
    The house, the money, the luxuries, the travel, the security, the ease: all of it would have been heavenly to Theresa Newman. Why shouldn’t it have been? She had been brought across the world on the outside chance of what might come true, and here she was, still youthful, livinga dream, with a family of her own to share it. Still, the idea that she may have been interested overly in the things that money can buy caused discomfort for her son. “She was raised in a very poor family,” Paul explained decades later, “and had a sense of values that we pooh-pooh right now—you know, materialistic things, trying to get two cars in the garage.”
    Perhaps that’s why his favorite memories of his boyhood would so often be set out of doors. Shaker Heights was genteel and grand, yes, but it was still in Ohio, and it provided an Eden for a knockabout pair like Paul and his brother, Art. “We would explore lakes and forests,” Paul recalled. “You could almost see the Indians hunting there and fishing.” The Newman boys and their dog, Cleo, were outside all the time, even in the coldest weather that the winds of Lake Erie could dish out. Paul especially recalled tobogganing and skating on frozen ponds and scaring neighborhood girls with jack-o’-lanterns on Halloween nights.
    And when it wasn’t wintertime activities, it was organized team sports. Surely the sons of
the
Newman of Newman-Stern would be drawn into team games, in an era when American manly vitality expressed itself so sensationally in athletics. But there was a problem. “My brother and I,” Paul would say, “we both went in for every single sport you could think of. And
I
was terrible at all of them. Really—notoriously ungifted.” He played baseball, football, and basketball, but in none did he ever feel fluent or graceful or even able. It had partly to do with youthful klutziness: “Boy, was I accident-prone. If there was a tree with a creaky limb, you could be sure that was the one I would pick to climb, and snap!” But it was partly due to self-consciousness too. He