After the release of Martin Scorsese’s film The Color of Money in 1986, all the major American magazines and newspapers began to reassess its Academy Award-winning star, Paul Newman. Life, Newsweek, The Washington Post and the New York Times all carried major features on the 61-year-old actor, measuring who he was and what he had achieved.

In a way, Newman was doing the same thing in The Color of Money; he was revisiting a part he had played in 1961, Fast Eddie Felson, the fatally arrogant pool shark from The Hustler. It was an extraordinary opportunity to survey the same character from two dramatically different perspectives in his history; an opportunity that would showcase Newman’s insight, his command of technique and mark his movement from star to character actor.

Media menace
Most of the media coverage was positively exultant, underlining Newman’s status as a major American institution. However, Rupert Murdoch’s The New York Post used the opportunity to launch a petty campaign about the actor’s height – yes, his height. A Times feature had said that Newman was 5ft 11 inches tall and the Post responded by announcing that it would give $1,000 to charity for every inch that Newman was above 5ft 8.

Newman hit the ceiling. He went on television to debunk the Post articles, claiming that if they could prove he was 5ft 8, he would write a cheque to the newspaper for $500,000. He also challenged the Post to put up $100,000 for every inch he measured above 5ft 8.

The controversy went on for a week. The newspaper made a show of seeking corroboration for its stories; Newman employed an orthopaedist to make him seem as tall as he could and prepared to have himself measured on TV.

The paper huffed and puffed and finally dropped the matter, agreeing to print an angry letter from Newman in which he said that finding “the truth in the New York Post was as difficult as finding a good hamburger in Albania”.

Liberal life
Newman, who was apparently 5ft 11, was a functioning liberal all his life. He despised what he believed conservative business magnates such as Murdoch had done to the media in the United States.

“He may have a hospital complex somewhere; he may have built 60 Presbyterian churches but I think he is a real blood sucker. He will take and squeeze and take again and never give anything back,” was Newman’s fierce assessment of Murdoch.

Commitment not an issue
In his new book, Paul Newman – A Life, author Shawn Levy portrays the Ohio-born actor as someone who had a feisty commitment to engaging with life on every level, whether it was through his support for presidential no-hopers such as Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern, his backing for various civil rights campaigns, his insistence on bringing what he had learned at the Actors’ Studio to his film sets or his tortured commitment to anti-drugs programmes after the death of his son Scott following a drugs overdose.

He engaged so earnestly with his life outside the cinema that his wife, Joanne Woodward, once remarked that he became a better actor after he took up race-car driving in middle age.

A star is born
As a movie actor, Newman hit the ground running. Right enough, his first film The Silver Chalice in 1954 was an embarrassment (when it subsequently appeared on television he took out an advertisement in trade paper Variety apologising for it). However, the following year he made Somebody Up There Likes Me, the movie that established him and made him one of the great icons of the cinema.

When the traditional Hollywood idea of a star was going out of fashion with the collapse of the studio system, Newman, with Steve McQueen and others, reinvented the notion of stardom with a 60s’ and 70s’ outsider’s edge.

Bristles with detail
This is generally well known but Levy’s achievement is in the way he uses the other aspects of Newman’s life to balance his story. He elevates it with a bristling detail that makes it more credible and readable as a narrative. As you would expect, every well-known aspect of Newman’s life has at least one counter aspect in Levy’s telling. The most obvious example is his lengthy marriage to Woodward.

When asked about it, Newman once said: “Why should I go out for hamburger when I have steak at home?” However, he did “go out” on one occasion – and stayed out for 18 months. On the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Mexico, he began an affair with divorced journalist Nancy Bacon, whom 20th Century Fox had employed to do a magazine piece about the making of the movie.

Bacon later wrote about the affair – once in a gossipy biography – comparing herself to Woodward and criticising the boorish way the actor treated her. Although she publicly denied it, Woodward knew about the affair. Levy recounts a story about two producers, who were working on a TV project with Newman, spending more than $3,000 to buy him the bicycle from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. However, Woodward refused to have it in their home and banished it as emphatically as she had banished the relationship it represented to her.

Worth a read
A Life is easily the best, most filled out and intelligently analysed biography of Paul Newman that has been published to date. The concluding chapters deal with the way he established the salad dressing franchise Newman’s Own and used its enormous profits to subsidise a charity operation that has brought untold comfort and support to impoverished children all over the world.

Newman learned as he went along and, by the time of his death, he was recognised as a supremely accomplished actor. However, as A Life shows, he was much more than that.