In one of Hollywood’s ultimate ‘woe is me’ first-world problems, the one thing that Paul Newman always hated the most about his acting career was that he was so damned handsome. What a poor fella.
Ever since he first began treading the boards in the late 1940s, all he wanted was to be taken seriously. Nobody ever denied that he was good at his job, but they could also agree that he was very easy on the eye, which became a smouldering albatross around his neck when he made the jump to cinema.
He was constantly besieged with offers to play charming rogues with a twinkle in their eye, and he kept batting them away. Even though he was a charming rogue with a twinkle in his eye, he was desperate to prove himself as a top-tier thespian, instead of embracing the fact that he was a very good-looking chap.
Of course, there were plenty of roles and performances that played into his aesthetically pleasing visage, even if he grew resentful over having the most striking blue eyes in the business. Fortunately, winning an Academy Award and being nominated a further nine times made it patently clear that he wasn’t just another pretty face, but Newman didn’t embrace his heartthrob status until he watched a porno flick.
At first glance, that makes absolutely no sense, but never let it be forgotten that he was a randy bugger. Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, constructed a bespoke boudoir on the grounds of their home that they dubbed the ‘Fuck Hut’, and its purpose should be fairly self-explanatory. He credited her with transforming him into “a sexual creature,” and there was more ‘too much information’ to come.
“You know how it’s decided some luminary deserves a special evening, an honour, right?” he wrote in his memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man. “If I ever deserve an evening tribute, it should be for the invention of that sex symbol that was created by Joanne. And it shouldn’t be done at the American Film Institute or the Oscars; it should be a parade right before the Orange Bowl or the Rose Bowl. There could be a float with a flag waving.”
In 1974, director Just Jaeckin’s adaptation of the novel, Emmanuelle, premiered on the big screen. Thanks to Last Tango in Paris, French producers realised that audiences fancied seeing some titillation at their local cinema, which inspired Yves Rousset-Rouard to buy the rights. It became one of the highest-grossing local films of all time, and when it was shipped over to America, it was the first X-rated film to be distributed by Columbia Pictures.
What does that have to do with Newman? Technically, he makes a cameo appearance, as he shared when continuing to tout his hypothetical sex symbol parade. “There could be interviews with women who remember the French softcore porn film, Emmanuelle,” he said. “Where the heroine opens a magazine to a photo of me. I thought that was really the moment of my arrival.”
He wasn’t too keen on being called a sex symbol, but if a French skin flick said it was true, then he accepted that it must have been.
