Outing Paul Newman

A new biography will be, reportedly, outing Paul Newman. Darwin Porter, who, in previous biographies, has "outed" Merv Griffin, writes about an interview with Marlon Brando where Brando states:

He never fooled me. Paul Newman had just as many on-location affairs as the rest of us, and he was just as bisexual as I was. But, where I was always getting caught with my pants down, he managed to do it in the dark.

In this incidence, the reference is to a supposed relationship with James Dean. The estate of Paul Newman is saying that this is false, and it is a continuation of rumors that went on about Mr. Newman throughout his life.

Just for the record, the Merv Griffin biography says this about the legendary television figure:

He lost his virginity, to a female, that is, when Judy Garland seduced him. His first crush was Errol Flynn, whom he saw passed out naked on a couch. His roommate a year and a half was Montgomery Clift. He lived with Roddy McDowall here at the Dakota, where he introduced Eddie Fisher to Elizabeth Taylor. He maintained a virtual male harem and a pimp who supplied porn stars, but I don't go into his pay-for-gay guys. I keep it to his A-list dates like Rock Hudson, whom he met through Henry Wilson, Rock's agent, and who advised him to keep his sexuality quiet.

And there was a young James Dean selling his sex for cash. Plus Judy Garland's 'Meet Me in St. Louis' boy next door, Tom Drake, who, by the way, ended up a used car salesman. There was Peter Lawford, Robert Walker, Gordon Scott the then-Tarzan. And lots about Merv's prolonged sexual tryst with Marlon Brando. There are his experiences at Liberace's all-male orgies. His first encounter, a boyhood friend he grew up with, later tried writing a book about Merv. This being an era when male actors felt homosexuality was a danger to their career, lawyers shot down that book fast.

I write that friends who went to school with him in San Mateo say, when he was a young homosexual growing up, he was sexually molested.

I mean, I'm as jaded and interested as the next guy -- god knows that, in the cocaine hey-day of the 1970s what the actors were doing -- but a lot of this seems pretty fanciful.

Though, trust me, to have been a fly on the wall in the bedroom for a Dean-Newman tryst in the 1970s... WOWZA!