In his memoir Somebody Down Here Likes Me, Too, the boxer Rocky Graziano, on whom Paul Newman based his performance in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), describes the actor in perfect Runyonese:
I could see right off there ain’t one thing phony about this guy. Maybe there was. He was too good-looking. In fact, the guy is pretty… He’s got bright blue eyes, but when you look in ’em you see a hard look dancing around inside. Only one other guy I see these same eyes on an’ that was another friend of mine, Frank Sinatra. When their blue eyes spot a wise guy, the eyes say, ‘Don’t fuck with me, man!’
To judge by Paul Newman, a monumental cuttings job by someone who never met him, and Paul and Me, an anecdotal memoir by his oldest friend, Graziano got him about right. Despite his close friendship with Gore Vidal — they used to go on holiday together, and one can hear Gore drawl, ‘No need to be shy, Paul, you don’t need a swimsuit among friends’ — Newman seems to have been a pretty straight guy.
He may not have been a great success as a father, but that was more the world’s fault; his daughters preferred ‘doggy- looking guys’, and his son, who tried to follow in his footsteps, died young of an overdose.
He left his first wife and children for Joanne Woodward, of whom he gallantly said, ‘I have steak at home, so why go out for hamburger?’ And he cheated on her, too, with a Nancy Bacon, prompting the riposte that he had steak at home but went out for bacon. The marriage survived, though, and Newman’s unreconstructed gallantry with it. In 1997, when he was 72, Woodward visited him on the set of a turkey called Twilight, and he said to a fellow actor, ‘Will you look at the ass on her?’
In every other facet of a multi-faceted life — as a champion racing-car driver and owner, racing into his eighties, as an organic salad-dressing tycoon, as a supremely modest philanthropist, and above all as an actor and movie star — he was a decent chap or good bloke, sans reproche.
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