In the fall of 1969, Hollywood’s most admired couple paid for a full-page advertisement in the Los Angeles Times to tell America they were not splitting up. The decision was extraordinary. Happy couples rarely need to buy newspaper ads to prove their marriages were intact. The ad came at a moment when the gossip about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward had reached a pitch neither could ignore.
The image they had spent years cultivating, the golden couple at the center of American entertainment, was under assault, and they responded with the most public defensive gesture they could manage. But to understand why that page existed at all, the story must begin elsewhere, with a woman almost no one remembers. Her name was Jackie Witte. In December 1949, she married a young Navy veteran named Paul Newman, a man with no film career, no fame, and no sign of either on the horizon.
Jackie had her own ambitions. Decades later, her daughter Stephanie would state it plainly: their mother wanted to become an actress. Instead, the children came quickly. A son, Scott, was born in September 1950, followed by Susan in 1953 and Stephanie in 1954.
These three children were hers and Paul’s. Joanne Woodward was not their mother. When the marriage ended, they stayed with Jackie, and no amount of later fame changed who raised them day after day. Stephanie described the aftermath with a sentence that still carries pain: she was a child forced to watch her father and stepmother ride off into Hollywood horizons, while her mother was left with three children under the age of five.
The public version of the story would erase Jackie for decades. She only re-entered the record when Paul Newman, working on his memoirs in the 1980s, asked someone to go and hear her side. Until then, she was the silent figure behind the legend, the first wife in a love story America spent five decades telling without mentioning her. In February 1953, William Inge’s play Picnic opened on Broadway.
Paul Newman played a supporting role as Alan Seymour, the wealthy young man who loses the girl, though he badly wanted the lead. One of the understudies that season was a young actress from Georgia named Joanne Woodward, early in a career about to accelerate faster than his. Newman was married with a young family at home. None of that stopped what began between them during that production.
Woodward spent the season waiting backstage for a chance that might never come, playing the roles of Madge and her younger sister Millie only when needed. Newman also waited in his own way, playing the rich boy while wishing for the part that steals the girl. Two ambitious people worked the same production, each one step away from the role they truly wanted. Nearly everything that followed began backstage at that theater.
The relationship did not move quickly. By most accounts, the affair lasted about five years before Newman finally left his first marriage. They were long, uneasy years, with both careers rising and no divorce in sight. Biographers say Jackie initially refused to end the marriage.
That refusal gives the story its first strange resonance. Long before anyone asked why Joanne Woodward stayed with Paul Newman, another woman had clung to him first. Later in life, Newman never claimed he handled any of it well. In the memoirs published after his death, he wrote about leaving his first family with words that are difficult to soften.
The second marriage was built on that fact, a truth the fan magazines omitted. Another marriage had to break before this one could exist. The son in that first family was Scott Newman. He was seven years old when his father married again, the only boy in the family his father was leaving behind.
Twenty years later, his name would return to the story at its lowest point. For now, he lived with his mother and two younger sisters while his father’s name began appearing in newspapers for reasons unrelated to them. Jackie finally agreed to the divorce. On January 29, 1958, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward married in Las Vegas.
No cathedral, no crowds of photographers, none of the Hollywood spectacle that would surround them later. The ceremony was quick and quiet. Then the new Mrs. Newman went back to work.
Less than two months later, on March 26, 1958, Joanne Woodward attended the Academy Awards and won Best Actress for The Three Faces of Eve. She was twenty-eight years old. Her husband was five years older and had not yet been nominated for anything. His first nomination came the following year for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Critics were still comparing him to Marlon Brando, not always kindly. For a moment in the spring of 1958, the balance in that marriage looked nothing like what the world would remember. She had won an Oscar for playing a woman with three separate personalities, the kind of role that told the industry it had a serious dramatic actress on its hands. He had started with The Silver Chalice, a historical film critics disliked, and his breakthrough in Somebody Up There Likes Me only brought the Brando comparison he could not shake.
The statue in their new home belonged to her, and in 1958 no one needed to be told which of them had proven themselves. One of them was a trained, respected actress with an Oscar on her shelf. The other was a handsome newcomer going through a divorce, supporting three children, and stuck with a reputation as someone else’s imitation. If you had bet that year on who would become the legend, she would have been the easy choice.
Over the next ten years, that picture changed film by film. The Hustler arrived in 1961, followed by Hud in 1963 and Cool Hand Luke in 1967. Paul Newman’s face, the blue eyes and all the rest, became one of the most famous on earth. The actor critics had dismissed as a Brando imitator became a star everyone recognized.
Joanne kept working and earning respect, but the household began to center on one career, and it was not hers. In the early 1960s, the couple settled in Westport, Connecticut, away from the Los Angeles studios. Legend later said the choice saved the marriage, and there may be some truth in it. It was also practical for a family that kept growing.
Three daughters arrived in rapid succession: Nell in 1959, Melissa in 1961, and Clea in 1965. Paul was now father to six children, three at home in Connecticut and three from his first marriage living with Jackie. Joanne never hid the price she paid in those years. In 1981, she told the New York Times she had cut her career short because of her children, significantly, and that she had resented it at the time, which was not a good state in which to raise them.
Paul later wrote that being a star made everything disruptive for his children. Neither of them described that house as an easy place to live. Joanne spoke more about the difficulty of managing a marriage between two actors than about romance. There was her ego, his ego, and their joint ego.
Paul described the pull between them differently. The bond that connected him to Joanne was that everything seemed possible. Both statements could be true at once. There was something else in that house the public never saw.
Paul Newman drank, and he drank heavily. His children later described him as a functioning alcoholic. He could knock back a case of beer at dinner. In his memoirs, he admitted to terrible things that happen because of liquor.
Fame did not stabilize him either. He wrote about understanding that what people demanded of him was not actually him. The man with America’s most famous blue eyes seemed to believe the country was in love with someone else. The family at home in Connecticut saw the drinking and the anxiety.
The public saw the smile and the perfect pair. Then, in the mid-1960s, a project showed what they could still build together. A producer sent Joanne a draft of Margaret Laurence’s novel A Jest of God, the story of a lonely, repressed teacher in a small town. Joanne saw something in it.
She bought the rights herself and asked a writer she trusted to adapt it. His name was Stewart Stern, Paul Newman’s closest friend. Twenty years later, Stern would be the one sitting before the entire family with a tape recorder, and what he captured would outlast every attempt to control it. But in the mid-1960s, he was simply a screenwriter for a small, unglamorous film almost no one in Hollywood wanted to make.
The studio saw no success in a quiet story about a lonely teacher. So the couple found another way. Warner Brothers Seven Arts finally agreed, but only on its terms. Newman and Woodward gave up their salaries in exchange for a share of the profits.
The budget was about 780,000 dollars. Behind the camera stood Paul Newman himself, directing his first feature film, with his wife in the lead. The most famous actor in America stepped out of the frame to put her at the center of the picture. Rachel, Rachel premiered in August 1968 and did far better than anyone expected.
It received four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Joanne. She won the Golden Globe and the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress. Paul took the Golden Globe for Best Director and New York Critics’ directing prize as well. For one brief season, the Newmans really were what the magazines portrayed.
The film also began a habit that lasted decades. Paul directed Joanne again in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in 1972; that performance won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival the following year. He directed her in The Shadow Box for television in 1980, Harry and Son in 1984, and The Glass Menagerie in 1987. The most famous actor of his generation used part of that fame to support the actress he truly knew.
In July 1968, a month before Rachel, Rachel premiered, Playboy published an interview that gave the marriage its famous motto. Explaining why he saw no reason to look elsewhere, Paul Newman said: I have a steak at home. Why should I go out for a hamburger? America loved it.
The line was repeated so often that people took it as the gold standard of marital fidelity. For the next fifty years, it defined the Newman-Woodward relationship. Almost no one asked what the wife thought of it. But one person in that house had begun to hate it, and decades later, in the Stern interviews, she said so in her own words.
In September 1968, Newman began work on the biggest film of his career, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, shooting through January 1969. At some point during that period, according to one woman’s account, the promises of that devoted husband faded. Her name was Nancy Bacon, a former model turned Hollywood gossip columnist. In a 1975 book called Stars in My Eyes, Stars in My Bed, she wrote that she began an affair with Paul Newman in 1968.
By her account, it lasted about eighteen months, and she ended it because of his heavy drinking. The claim rests entirely on her word. Biographer Shawn Levy repeated it in his 2009 book Paul Newman: A Life, and the tabloids picked it up. There is no indication Joanne ever addressed the subject publicly.
There are good reasons to treat the story with extreme caution. It comes from a single source who made her living from gossip, and the Newman family never confirmed a word of it. Even skeptics must confront one detail: the reason she gave for ending the affair was his drinking, and his family later confirmed his heavy public drinking. What is documented is that Hollywood passed the rumor around, and the joke that circulated needed little explanation.
People said Paul Newman might stay home for dinner, but he was certainly going out for bacon. Whether or not the story was true in every detail, it did the same damage. The motto he had given Playboy only months earlier became material for mockery at his expense. The rumors had reached a pitch that demanded a response, and the timing could not have been more public.
Butch Cassidy premiered in September 1969 and became one of the decade’s biggest hits, putting Newman’s face on screens everywhere while the gossip peaked. The more famous he became, the more valuable the image of the faithful husband grew. Something had to be done about the story, and what the couple chose was highly unusual. That is where the newspaper page comes in.
Rather than issuing a studio denial or waiting quietly for the rumors to fade, Newman and Woodward published a full-page advertisement in the Los Angeles Times in 1969, declaring their commitment to each other. Read one way, it looked romantic. Read another, it was two partners defending the most valuable thing they shared: their story itself. There is an uncomfortable symmetry here.
Joanne Woodward had once been the other woman, waiting about five years for a married man to leave his wife. If Nancy Bacon’s account was true, Joanne now stood on the other side of the same arrangement, with an Oscar, her own money, and a joke about her marriage spreading through town. The social weight of divorce on a woman in 1969 was entirely different from what it is today, and her own marriage had begun as someone else’s divorce. She did not leave.
The sixties and seventies tested that decision in ways no newspaper ad could cover. The rumors faded, but the alcoholism did not. According to family accounts, tension in the house escalated and receded for years. Then, in the late 1970s, Joanne did something that people who dismiss her as a patient wife tend to forget.
According to Ethan Hawke, drawing on family records, she stopped allowing her husband into the house. The door stayed closed until both of them reached an arrangement. The terms were specific: Paul had to stop drinking hard liquor and limit himself to beer. It was not a life of total sobriety, and no one in the family claimed it was.
But it was a line, and she drew it. Their daughter Melissa later described her mother as the solid rock, even when she said she would put an end to it, that he had to fix himself or she would leave. Melissa added the detail that made the line hold: her father respected her mother because he knew she was not fooling him. In those same years, Joanne was building a life of her own.
On television, where serious roles existed for mature women, she won an Emmy for See How She Runs in 1978 and another for Do You Remember Love in 1985. Neither was produced by her husband. Both were her own work. The actress who stepped back in the 1960s found a way forward again, starting in the same year she was setting boundaries at her own front door.
Then came a loss no negotiation could address. Scott Newman, the boy who had been seven when his father remarried, grew up in the shadow of his father’s fame and tried, in his own way, to find a place in the same field. He sang in clubs under the name William Scott. After a motorcycle accident, he was taking painkillers and receiving treatment at a clinic, at his father’s expense.
None of it was enough. On the evening of November 19, 1978, according to news reports of the time, Scott called his caregivers for help. A counselor named Scott Steinberg picked him up, and they ate together in Scott’s hotel room in West Los Angeles. Later, after Scott fell asleep, Steinberg noticed his breathing had changed.
He was pronounced dead in the early hours of November 20. He was twenty-eight years old. The cause was a combination of Valium, alcohol, and painkillers. His father was in Ohio directing a play.
In his memoirs, Newman made no attempt to defend himself. He wrote that he had kept thinking his son was going through a phase of teenage miscalculation, and it never occurred to him it would end fatally. Then he asked the question no one could answer: was there a way to tell him he did not have to be like me? And then came the hardest sentence in the book.
He had knelt many times, he wrote, asking Scott’s forgiveness, including for the part of himself that had driven his son to self-destruction. In one place he admitted plainly: I do not have the talent for fatherhood. Newman’s response to grief was practical. In 1980, he helped found the Scott Newman Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, named for his son.
Two years later, he and his friend A. E. Hotchner began bottling a salad dressing Newman had made as a joke, under the name Newman’s Own, and decided all profits would go to charity. The joke became a serious business.
Since 1982, the company has donated more than 600 million dollars. The events stand side by side in his life. By 1988, the money was also funding the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a camp for children with serious illnesses that Newman founded in Connecticut. He received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1994.
By the end of the decade, people no longer spoke of Newman and Woodward as a Hollywood love story so much as a moral institution, proof that decency could survive fame. By the mid-1980s, Newman was approaching sixty and tried something rare for stars of his generation. He decided to tell the full truth about his life before anyone else did. He asked Stewart Stern, the close friend who had written Rachel, Rachel about twenty years earlier, to prepare a complete oral history for his planned memoirs.
From 1986 to 1991, Stern interviewed Paul, Joanne, their children, and the people around them, including Gore Vidal, Elia Kazan, and George Roy Hill. The interview transcripts eventually reached thousands of pages. Stern also went to interview someone else: Jackie Witte, the first wife, the woman history had quietly erased. Newman had asked him to go and hear her side.
Hawke, who read everything later, found this detail more moving than anything else. After decades of silence, her account was finally recorded, and it was Newman’s idea. Then he destroyed it. Or tried to.
His daughter Clea told the story without elaboration: their father took the recordings to a landfill and burned them. The family dates the event to 1991. Other published accounts place it later in the decade. No one ever fully explained why he did it.
Clea later said her father began the project because he wanted to dispel the myth that everything was perfect. Somewhere between that intention and the fire, something inside him changed. Years later, he also burned his tuxedo in the driveway of his Connecticut home, as if fame itself were something he could set alight. For a man who spent his life under observation, destroying the evidence in private may have been the only control he had left.
But the tapes were not the only version. Stern’s transcripts survived, kept in the basement of the family home in Connecticut and in a storage unit. Years after both men had died, Clea Newman contacted Ethan Hawke. That call led, in July 2022, to The Last Movie Stars, a six-part documentary series in which George Clooney read Paul’s words, Laura Linney read Joanne’s, and Zoe Kazan read Jackie’s.
That October, the transcripts also became Newman’s posthumous memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man. One of the first things those pages settled was the question of the motto. For decades, America repeated the Playboy line as a proof of fidelity, but Joanne Woodward, in her own recorded words, could not stand it. She called it a chauvinistic statement.
She was not a piece of meat, for God’s sake. And she went further: every time she saw the quote, she wanted to kill. Inside the marriage, Hollywood’s most famous compliment was seen as an insult. The transcripts also contained the kind of thing a studio publicist would have burned first.
Talking about motherhood, Joanne said something that still startles readers: she loved all her children and they were all wonderful individuals deserving of love, but if she had to do it over again, she was not sure she would have children. Actors, she said, do not make good parents. Stephanie described her mother’s story as unbearable to watch, admitting she could feel disgust for her father when she thought of her mother. One subject that keeps coming up about Newman is entirely absent from those pages.
For years, rumors circulated that he had relationships with men, including stories involving James Dean, Marlon Brando, and his close friend Robert Redford. Most of these claims trace back to a 2009 book by Darwin Porter, from a publisher known for salacious celebrity scandals, and much of it relies on interviews no one can verify. The family reportedly described Porter’s claims as disgusting. Nothing in the memoirs supports them.
If anything, the memoirs are shy about sex generally, and what little they say points only in one direction. Writing about his early years with Joanne, Newman credited her with transforming him, writing that she made him a sexual being. That statement proves nothing either way about the other rumors, but it does show whom the man himself chose to name when he finally sat down to tell his own story. Redford and Newman were close friends for decades, and when Redford died in September 2025, that friendship was remembered publicly.
Friendship is all the reliable records show. None of this cancels the good years, and there were good years. In 1987, after years of being ignored, Newman finally won a competitive Oscar for Best Actor for The Color of Money. In 1990, he and Joanne played a long, quiet, unequal marriage on screen in Mr.
and Mrs. Bridge, which brought Joanne her fourth Oscar nomination. Newman kept racing cars into his final years. The house in Westport, chosen decades earlier as a refuge from Hollywood, became exactly that.
In the marriage’s later years, the balance quietly returned to where it began. In the early 2000s, Joanne served as artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse. Under her leadership, the theater sent a production to Broadway for the first time in nearly fifteen years: a revival of Our Town. Its star was Paul Newman.
More than four decades after her Oscar win, the Best Actress of 1958 ran the theater while America’s most famous leading man worked in her company. When people asked Joanne what held the marriage together, she did not mention steaks. Her answer was simpler. In a 2002 television interview, she said that he was handsome and sexy and all those things, but that fades, and in the end, if you can make someone laugh, that is very important, and he certainly always made her laugh.
After Newman died, Joanne withdrew from public life. Her last known public appearance was around 2013. For years after his death, the legend went largely uncontested because the woman at its center could no longer tell her side. Then the transcripts came out, read by other actors, and the family’s private record became public.
In February 2026, Joanne Woodward will turn ninety-six. Return one last time to that page in the Los Angeles Times. For decades, it looked like the marriage’s most manufactured moment, a paid advertisement for a love story at the very moment that love story was in trouble. Now that everything is documented, it looks different.
The drinking, the rumors, the first wife, the boy who died at twenty-eight: all of it already existed or was on its way while that page was published. In 1969, they were not describing a perfect marriage. They were committing themselves to building one, and the woman in that marriage would, within a decade, close the door in his face to hold him to it. Joanne Woodward was never just a piece of meat in Paul Newman’s house, and in her own words, she refused to be one.
She was the one who decided, year after year, whether the house would stand. So when you look at that newspaper page now, what do you see? A couple covering up a lie, or a promise two people spent the rest of their lives trying to keep?