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had developed into a critic of himself, seeing flaws where others might have seen mere ordinariness.
    It made him reticent, cautious, a little introverted. Hugh Leslie, who grew up five houses away from the Newmans on Brighton Road and was in Paul’s grade through high school, remembered, “He wasn’t shy, but I think he was more on the quiet side, the humble side. He participated in school activities, but he wasn’t gregarious or real outgoing.” The Newmans, he said, “were good people, good neighbors,” but Paul never particularly stood out.
    Worse, he grew late. He was a more or less average-size boy, but as a young teen he leveled off, causing him genuine agony in the thing he most loved. “I wanted to play football so bad,” he remembered. “And I played in junior high school.” Don Mitchell, the captain of that junior high team, had strong memories of Newman’s ability. “He played center for us, and he wasn’t afraid of anybody,” Mitchell recalled. “He could really hit people. He was built. He could have wrestled.” But he stayed small, and it cost him. “In high school, in the ninth grade,” Paul remembered, “I still weighed ninety-eight pounds and was about five foot three. So I had to get a special dispensation so I wouldn’t have to play with the lightweights, because the lightweights were all sixth graders. And I was fucked if I was going to play with those guys.” The dispensation didn’t come: he never did play organized sports in high school.
    But he had started to blossom in other ways, ways less interesting to a rollicking boy, perhaps, but readily noticed by a mother. “He was such a beautiful little boy,” Theresa Newman told a reporter in 1959. “In a way it was a shame to waste so much beauty on a boy.” He also became one of those people who struggled against a native reticence by overcompensating, in certain situations, as a gadabout or a show-off. He wasn’t comfortable in his own skin, but in the right circumstance he could don another and let himself go. “Paul was the neighborhood clown,” Theresa remembered. “He yodeled and sang and acted in all sorts of little neighborhood stunts.”
    His youthful exhibitionism spilled onto the stage. At Malvern Elementary School he performed as an organ grinder in a class play, bouncing about and singing mock-Italian. (“I made up in volume what I lacked in tone,” he recalled.) When he was seven, he appeared as a court jester in a play entitled
The Travails of Robin Hood
, singing a song written especially for the occasion by his uncle Joe. “I didn’t like it,” Paul later said. “I felt as uncomfortable and disturbed then as I do now when I’m onstage. I had one entrance and one exit. I was a big hit. My family was hysterical with pride and admiration.”
    Surely Theresa was the proudest and most admiring. “She was a frustrated actress, I guess,” Paul said, and she saw in him a channel for her blunted ambitions. When he was eleven, she enrolled him in theCurtain Pullers, a newly organized program in which children studied and performed at the renowned Cleveland Play House. “The Play House was a first-rate regional theater, and everybody who was in those classes felt they were lucky,” remembered Joel Katz, who joined the Curtain Pullers about five years after Paul and later adopted the stage name Joel Grey. * “We went to class on Saturday mornings, and then we had productions on Saturdays, and some of us had roles in the grown-up productions that the Play House put on.”
    On Halloween morning 1936 Paul made his debut as the human lead in
St. George and the Dragon
by Alice Buchan. He wore a florid costume and poured salt on the Dragon’s tail. “I wanted to play the Dragon,” he moaned mockingly years later. “It was a meatier part. But I was too big for the costume.” (Even then, a preteen, he considered himself a character actor in a leading man’s body.) Bill DeMora, who played the Dragon in that