Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s Daughter Had to Read Their ‘Naughty’ Letters

I tend to think of myself as fairly progressive, but anytime I’m confronted with the fact that my parents had to bone to get my sister and me into the world, I regress into bratty ignorance. Blah blah blah, don’t want to hear about it! Melissa Newman is a braver woman than me.

Newman, the middle daughter of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward published Head Over Heels on October 10th, which included photos of and letters between her famously horny and in-love parents.

“I would read the letters and just go, ‘Oh, this is so sweet. This should go in the book.’ And then I would be reading on, and then I’d go, ‘Ooh, Dad, I can’t put this in the book!’” Newman told Fox News Digital, adding that she’d found 10 of them in an almost discarded box in her parents’ Connecticut attic. She describes them as “bawdy” and “naughty” but “not smutty.” A tough line to toe!

This should come as no surprise to those of us who remember the revelation from Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir, The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man, which came out in October 2022. In it, we learn that Paul and Joanne had a dedicated room in their Beverly Hills mansion that they called a “fuck hut.” Paul wrote, “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.” In another section, he confessed, “We left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars.”

If the kids weren’t somehow aware of the Fuck Hut as children, between his book and these letters, they are now! No, in all seriousness, Melissa seems to have a very mature and appreciative approach to her parents’ affection for one another. “I was like, ‘You go, Mom!’ My mom was just a free spirit. She was her own powerful force… She did it all,” Melissa told Fox. “And evidently, she was a sex bomb at the same time.”

Paul passed away in 2008 at the age of 83. Joanne has lived with Alzheimer’s since 2007 and has since retreated from the public eye. Sure sounds like these two had their fun while they were together.