Today, in “Paul Newman had a Fuck Hut” news: Paul Newman totally had a Fuck Hut.
This is per Vanity Fair, reporting on excerpts from Newman’s upcoming memoir The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Man. Due out later this month, the book collects Newman’s recollections from years of stories that were ultimately never published, until now. Among other things, that means watching Newman delve into his own relationship with his sexuality, contrasting his on-screen heartthrob appearance with an awkwardness around women—at least, until he met his second wife, Joanne Woodward, at which point, well… Fuck Hut.
That, apparently, was Newman and Woodward’s nickname for a separate room that Woodward rigged up with its own dedicated bed, off of the master bedroom, that was specifically for the two of them to, in Newman’s words, leave “a trail of lust all over the place.”
In writing about Woodward—who he’d ultimately be married to for 50 years, from 1958 until his death in 2008—Newman acknowledged that this joyful unleashing of his inner hut fucker came at the cost of both the woman he was actually married to at the time, Jackie Witte, as well as his three children. Calling himself “brutal in his detachment” from his family, Newman notes that “Even if my kids came over, we’d go into the Fuck Hut several nights a week and just be intimate and noisy and ribald.” (It’s worth noting, though, that members of Newman’s family, including Claire, one of his daughters with Woodward, are supportive of the memoir being published; that comes complete with Newman’s own exhortation that everyone involved with it be “completely honest,” and his hope that it “Pokes holes in the mythology that’s sprung up around me, and [keeps] the piranhas off.”)
The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Man arrives in bookstores on October 18.