Melissa Newman once told her father — Paul Newman, that Paul Newman — that she imagined him standing in front of a giant billboard featuring a photo of his famous, gorgeous face. But in her imagining, she said, the movie star himself stands beneath the photo: “Just a little person with a little sign saying, ‘It’s me. I’m here.’”
That desire to be seen as his true self is at the heart of his posthumous memoir, “Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man.” Filled with inner turmoil and self-doubt, much of it fueled by family dysfunction, the unusual release comes on the heels of the HBO docuseries “The Last Movie Stars,” which used a wider lens to explore the lives and loves of Newman and wife Joanne Woodward. Both draw on the same remarkable cache of interviews — material that a conflicted Newman created and then abandoned.
Good writing, I think, ultimately exists between the twin goal posts of as-few-words-as-you-need and as-many-words-as-you-want. I, a natural natterer, lean toward the latterer.
But one must draw the line somewhere. I recommend striking out “actually” at every opportunity, unless it’s in a discussion of the movie “Love Actually,” in which case we might want to focus on the title’s confounding commalessness. Similarly, though I would never fault the supreme lyricist Johnny Mercer for the gorgeous “You’re much too much / And just too very very,” I am on constant alert for “very,” always looking for the chance to dispose of it. I’d encourage you to do the same.
Every morning for three months of the year, Lola wakes at 8 and goes hunting. She races past oak trees, running at full speed through a 50-hectare field set in the southern end of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The daily challenge — to find her elusive prey — never fails to excite Lola. She darts from place to place until faltering at last: 40 minutes into her day, she gets distracted or simply gives in to exhaustion.
Lola is a Brittany spaniel, and beneath her orange-spotted white coat is the agile body of a hunter. But her most important tool is her sense of smell. “Through training, dogs learn to recognize substances in their long-term memory — in this case, the smell of truffles,” says dog trainer Germán Escobar.
My whole life, the smoky, vinegar-laced scent of pickled jalapeños — and their little-known origin story — has been lingering under my nose. I grew up with immigrant parents in California, and at any gathering chiles en escabeche were as commonplace as bottles of tequila and Squirt to make palomas.
But it wasn’t until this summer, when I revisited my family in Xalapa, in Veracruz state, that I realized that my parents’ hometown has played a major role in the history of the pickled jalapeño.
Eschewing body counts for philosophical debate, the legacy of McCarthy’s new offerings is, much as the author would surely wish, both magnificent and cruelly impossible to define.
Alan Rickman’s voice was a purr, but it masked sharp claws. This was evident in the memorable baddies he played and now you can hear it in the feline prose of these selected diaries. “John Major said, ‘You have given us so much enjoyment.’ ‘I wish I could say the same of you,’ was the unstoppable reply. He had the grace to laugh.” You suspect not everyone did. Rickman didn’t suffer fools and his intelligence keeps chafing against his fellow professionals – their self-absorption, their vanity, their unresponsiveness. He snipes and then regrets it. After a barney with his latest director he writes: “How can I curb this ability to distance and intimidate?”