Free Paul Newman by Shawn Levy Page A

Illinois alone. He brought with him a tall, dark-eyed blonde he’d met in Williams Bay, an aspiring actress named Jacqueline Emily Witte who would, on December 27, 1949, become the first Mrs. Paul Newman.
    They married at an anomalous moment in his life, to say the very least. By all accounts, they were both attractive, and they both claimed theatrical professions on their marriage license, so they were matched in some ways. But Jackie, as she was known, had only turned nineteen at the end of that summer, and she hadn’t yet graduated Lawrence College, the liberal arts school from which she was on vacation when she went off to Williams Bay. She was born in Illinois and raised in Beloit, Wisconsin, the oldest child of Frank T. Witte and the former Irene Elizabeth Telgman. Frank was one of five sons of Theopolis and Emma Witte and had joined his father in the family business, Witte and Son, a Beloit butcher shop. Frank and Irene weren’t young parents; when Jacqueline was born in September 1929, he was forty-one and she was thirty-five, and they had been married for ten years. Surely they shared some apprehensions as they watched, along with best man Art Newman Jr., as this handsome but unsettled couple exchanged rings and vows at the family church, St. Paul’s Episcopal.
    Even with Kenyon and the navy behind him, even with his good looks and athletic build, Newman still wasn’t what folks would have called a ladies’ man. During vacations from college, his high school chum Don Mitchell remembered running into him regularly at Louie’s, a restaurant-tavern-dance hall on the eastern edge of Shaker Heights. “The rule there was that you couldn’t go into the dance hall if you were a guy without a girl,” said Mitchell. “And he’d always be in the bar with the other guys who didn’t have a date.” Given that, there have been various surmises over the years as to just what led Newmanto marry so quickly and to someone so young. Pregnancy is a popular first guess, given the era and the midwestern morality that was in place. But no child was imminent. Newman accrued no advantage professionally or as a veteran for being married. One of his snarkier biographers has suggested that Newman wed Jackie out of homosexual panic, having gotten a sense of how many gay men there were in the theatrical world and how they would treat a handsome, fit young newcomer whom they suspected might be available. But the simplest explanation, if also the most conventional, is best: they were in love, and they could imagine staying together and being in love together for the rest of their lives. There’s no record of whether Art and Theresa Newman attended the wedding, but Art might very well have been pleased to think that his younger son was now responsible for somebody else’s welfare. It might straighten the boy out.
    S OMETHING MIGHT have to, because acting in stock companies wasn’t exactly the path to stability and security. What’s more, even in the context of the Woodstock Players, Newman didn’t make a stunning impression. “There wasn’t much to set him apart from the rest of them that were here at the time,” recalled W. H. “Bill” Tammeus, in whose house the newlywed Newmans rented a pair of rooms for $10 a month during their time in Illinois. “He was one of about twenty here during that period … and about fifteen were pretty equal in their accomplishments.”
    Karin, the oldest Tammeus child, remembered that the Newmans “were both very beautiful people in all ways. She was lovely and quiet, and he and my dad were real comfortable with each other.” The Tammeus family lived just a couple of blocks from the Opera House, and they supported the institution with membership in the Theater Guild and by regularly housing actors in their rambling thirteen-room Civil War–era house. The young Newmans slept in an upstairs bedroom, had access to a second kitchen in the basement, and shared the house’s one bathroom with the