The troubled life of Paul Newman

Paul Newman explains at the beginning how this book came about: ‘I want to leave some kind of record that sets things straight and pokes holes in the mythology that’s sprung up around me… Because what exists on the record has no bearing at all on the truth.’ Fair enough – but how come the book is only being published now, when Newman died in 2008?

The answer seems to be that the material was lost for many years. In 1986, Newman asked his closest friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, to collect accounts of his life from his family and friends. He said he might use them one day to write an autobiography. Stern assembled interviews for five years and also talked to Newman extensively, but no autobiography appeared. When Newman died, Stern asked his children what had happened to the transcripts, but they knew nothing about them. They eventually found them in a family storage unit and – Stern having died in the meantime – gave them to an editor, David Rosenthal, to compile into the present volume.