This past weekend, we began to notice stories popping up in various places about Paul Newman, lout. The stories, which were linked to the forthcoming publication (on May 5) of Shawn Levy's Paul Newman: A Life, the first comprehensive, posthumous biography of the star, tended to leave the impression that the book is a bombshell that portrays Newman as a "functioning alcoholic" whose much-admired, fifty-year marriage to Joanne Woodward was a cover for a string of affairs, which in turn by undermined by the fact that he was too drunk to play the great lover off-screen. To be honest, we weren't quite sure what to make of these reports, not just because there had been so little in coverage of Newman's life when he was alive to defend himself, but because Levy's earlier books--on Jerry Lewis, the Rat Pack, and Porfirio Rubirosa--were not slag jobs. Now Levy, who reviews movies for the Oregonian, has posted an entry at his blog lamenting those reports, which he sees as a misrepresentation of his book, and which he has traced back to Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and its "Page Six hatchet man Richard Johnson."

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