Newman told Stern that the first role he felt emotionally comfortable in was that of Frank Galvin, the alcoholic lawyer in “The Verdict,” which came out in 1982, rather late in his career. “I never had to ask myself to do anything in that picture,” Newman said. “Never had to call upon any reserves. It was always right there. I never prepared for anything, never had to go off in a corner, it was there immediately. It was wonderful.”
After he made “Winning,” in 1969, a movie about a race-car driver, for which he was paid a record 1.1 million dollars, Newman took up auto racing, and he got very good at it. He is in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest person to win a professionally sanctioned race—the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona. He was seventy. He attributed his success as a driver, too, to persistence. “The only thing I ever felt graceful at was racing a car,” he said. “And that took me ten years.”
Among the things the children want to amend is what one of them calls “the public fairy-tale” of Newman’s fifty-year marriage to Woodward. Woodward dated a lot of men before she met Newman, including Marlon Brando. But she was not glamorous. You wouldn’t know her in the street, which is why she could play many types. You would know Newman, which is why he couldn’t. They had an intense, lifelong love affair, and a big part of it, which they spoke about frankly in interviews, was sex. “Joanne gave birth to a sexual creature,” Newman says in the memoir. “I’m simply a creature of her invention.” They also bonded professionally. They made sixteen movies together; he directed her in five of them.
For a long time, though, the relationship was clandestine, because Newman was already married, to a woman named Jackie Witte, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask for a divorce. “Impossible times,” he told Stern. “I was a failure as an adulterer.” (It’s not clear what counts as a success in that field.) The affair made him…
