Paul Newman: Framing a Legend's Legacy

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“Whether or not “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” or its source material that animates Hawke’s documentary, lays bare those things in the way Newman himself would have wanted is itself a complication, or a function, of legacy. Lest we forget, Newman himself burned the tapes, perhaps having grown resentful or ambivalent to the whole idea of revisionist history. And yet our stories find ways of getting told, even when we’re not around to supervise.” (Kenyon Alumni Magazine)


When I read the article “What Makes a Legend” by Kenyon alumnus, Eileen Cartter '16, I was floored by how the image of Newman was captured and recreated. He was a man who was very well aware of his legacy, and how his image had changed as time passed. In the article, for example, college archivist, Abigail Tayse, wrote that fewer and fewer Kenyon students each year knew who Newman was. He was an actor, a racecar driver, an entrepreneur, and a philanthropist, among many other things. Therefore, when my group and I discussed how best to represent Newman, we were torn. How could we represent the man who set fire to the audiotapes that contained hundreds of hours of interviews between him and his friend? The task seemed daunting, and it is not unique to Newman.

In the third chapter of Yazdiha’s The Struggle for the People’s King, Yazdiha chronicles multiple instances of people or organizations reappropriating the image of Dr. King to their liking. During the Take Back Miami-Dade Campaign, for example, SAVE Dade’s LGBTQ rights campaign reached out to Coretta Scott King, asking her what she thought her husband’s thoughts on the issue were (84). Clarence B. Jones, a close friend of Dr. King, offered a different perspective, arguing that his friend’s thoughts were much less radical than Coretta Scott King implied. In his book, What Would Martin Say?, Jones interpreted King’s position on modern issues through a Conservative Evangelical lens (87). These perspectives are fundamentally different and cannot coexist. It is difficult to determine what King would or would not have said, and in a similar nature, it is impossible to determine what Newman would say.

Newman was an accomplished actor, a successful entrepreneur, an auto-racing enthusiast, and a generous philanthropist. We do not have access to his thoughts nor can we ever truly know what he would have thought of our exhibit. The thought terrifies me, and I recognize that we need to do right by him. Regardless, the vestiges of the past remain. Actors who have worked with him in the past, his friends, and family members continue to carry on his memory. There is likely no one true memory of Paul Newman. Different people have different interpretations of who Newman was and what he cared about, and it is difficult to properly explore that through a display. Whether we’re doing Newman a disservice or not remains to be seen, and my group is not the arbiter for that either. We are framing a narrative of Newman’s life, but its ultimately the audience that interprets and determines what it all means.

 

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