The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man - A Memoir

Informationen zum Autor Paul Newman Klappentext "Several years before he died in 2008, Paul Newman commissioned his best friend to interview actors and directors he worked with, his friends, his children, his first wife, his psychiatrist, and Joanne Woodward, to create an oral history of his life. After hearing and reading what others said about him, Newman then dictated his own version of his life. Now this long-lost memoir--90% Newman's own narrative, interspersed with wonderful stories and recollections by his family, friends, and such luminaries as Elia Kazan, Tom Cruise, George Roy Hill, Martin Ritt--will be published"-- Leseprobe The incredibly stupid mistake I made coming out of the war, having not been shot down in the Pacific, was signing up for a non-coed school like Kenyon College. I thought what I wanted, even more than women, was a good education. I was something of a rake, and having women on campus, as I found at Ohio University, could cause a deflection in my concentration; going coed would be a great detriment to me. In an all-male school, I could really buckle down and study. Problem was, without women there, women became the obsession. Your every waking hour was spent figuring how you could get yourself a Gambier, Ohio, town girl. So instead of having girls on campus and kind of basking in their company, being able to pick and choose, their absence became the preoccupation. I had also neglected to research Kenyon College’s reputation as a party school. The very day I arrived there, dropped off by my parents on a Sunday afternoon in June at about three, I got distracted by a beer keg. By six o’clock, I was crocked. That was how long it took me to get in with the wrong crowd at Kenyon. So much for discipline. By the time I left Kenyon, I had no real education but owned the school’s beer-chugalug record. The caption under my yearbook photo said: “Prone to getting out of hand on long tiring evenings.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t really a student of anything. I did start out by signing up to be an economics major. Maybe I’d been thinking that I could end up working for my father at Newman-Stern (I even mentioned that as a possibility on my Kenyon application). I liked the store—and as I said, I was a good salesman—but the idea of a career there bored me. And while I got through my economics classes, even through accounting, I switched my major to poli sci. To tell you the truth, though, aided by the new stature I’d attained in the Navy, what I most enjoyed was being on the college’s football squad. Of course, when I found myself in disciplinary trouble, my plans had to change. Here’s how that happened, and it had everything to do with attending an all-male school. About ten miles east of Kenyon is Mount Vernon, Ohio, where many of us would hang out. There was a club there, the Bluebird Club, that sometimes had live dance bands or popular canned music. On the weekends, it was where you went to try and pick up single girls from town. And on this particular night, a bunch of us from the football team decided to visit together. There was a lot of antipathy between the local town boys and us. The townies were about our age, but they weren’t in school, many of them working for a living with their hands. We were the outsider college kids, so the antagonism was natural. It wasn’t unusual for fights to break out. What precipitated things was that we Kenyon guys were regularly trying to take their girls away from them. The townies would go to the john and when they came back, we’d be dancing with their dates. Usually these fights were really more pushing matches than anything else. Maybe some bloody noses or black eyes. But nobody ever kicked anyone when they were on the ground, and no one hid anything in their pockets. In fact in the days after these typical altercations, you might be walking down the street and see one of the townies you fo...

About the author

Paul Newman

Product details

• Authors: Melissa Newman, Paul Newman, Clea Newman Soderlund, David Rosenthal
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 18.10.2022
• EAN: 9780593534502
• ISBN: 978-0-593-53450-2
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 235 mm x 22 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies