For years, one detail has quietly followed Paul Newman around the internet: the claim that he had an affair with a Hollywood journalist/pin-up model named Nancy Bacon in the late 1960s. It shows up in comment sections, in Reddit threads about his marriage to Joanne Woodward. And yet almost nobody who repeats it seems to know who Nancy Bacon actually was. So I decided to find out. What follows is the result of a long, occasionally maddening research process.
Part One: How Nancy Bacon Entered the Public Eye
As far as I can tell, public first encounter this story today in Shawn Levy's biography, Paul Newman: A Life, published in May 2009. Levy's book is where the story picked up real credibility — it's a mainstream biography from a major publisher, and once the claim appeared there, it started getting treated as established fact rather than a decades-old tabloid item nobody had bothered to check.
Part Two: Trying to Verify Nancy Bacon’s Career
Here's the thing that struck me almost immediately: unlike Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper — genuine power players whose lives are documented down to the year — Nancy Bacon left almost no independent trace anywhere. On the back cover of her 1975 book Stars in My Eyes... Stars in My Bed, she's billed as Hollywood's "sexiest and highest-paid" gossip writer. I went looking for any confirmation of that career. I came up mostly empty. Here are the specific dead ends.
1.The original 1969 article.
The 2017 reissue of her memoir, Legends and Lipstick, never names the publication where her original piece on Newman supposedly ran. There's a interior photo that seems to show a magazine spread, but it doesn't show the magazine's name. Levy's own account doesn't name the outlet either — he simply describes it as a piece meant "a gossip magazine" .
2.The Confidential magazine credit.
Both Legends and Lipstick itself and its promotional pages consistently refer to the author as "editor of Confidential magazine." The book even includes a joking line — "Who better than the editor of Confidential magazine to dig in the dirt?" Wikipedia's detailed staff listing for Confidential doesn't include her name, at any point in the magazine's run. There's also a well-regarded book specifically about the magazine's most notorious years,named Shocking True Story:The Rise and Fall of Confidential,"America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazineand,written by Henry E. Scot, doesn't mention her either. Worth noting: the magazine really had two distinct eras. Pre-1958, it was the outlet that terrorized Hollywood and eventually got sued into a settlement. Post-1958, after being sold off, it became a much tamer, largely forgotten publication. According to Staci's own account, her mother posed for The Ventures' 1964 album cover Walk Don't Run '64, married rhythm guitarist Don Wilson in Las Vegas that December, and the two divorced in 1967. Staci writes that her mother "later became the editor of Confidentia magazine" — after the modeling work, after the marriage. It's not a precise date, but the sequencing at least points somewhere: whatever this job actually was, it seems to have come after 1964,which would mean the "Confidential editor" credit carries a lot less weight than it sounds like it should. I also went through every Confidential listing on eBay that had a visible masthead page, and none of them — early '60s, late '60s, 1970, doesn't matter — list Bacon under "Editor."That later era of the magazine is so obscure that almost nothing from it has been digitized or preserved.
3.Did She Really Appear in Paris Blue?
In Bacin’s 1983 novel Honeysuckle Moon, she claims she worked as a contract player on roughly a dozen Universal Studios pictures, including Paris Blues alongside Paul Newman. I went and pulled up the full cast and crew listing for that film — IMDb includes every uncredited extra down to the guy carrying luggage in a train car — and her name simply isn't there anywhere. She claims a career spanning dozens of films; the actual documented record shows two. Just to make a wry point here: if she was really in the film, why not claim “with Sidney Poitier” — the other male lead — instead? He is also a famous movie star.
- The 2017 reissue itself.
The publisher listed is a tiny, apparently self-published imprint with no other visible catalog. Of the handful of blurbs on the book, exactly one comes from someone independently verifiable — such as Shawn Levy, the writer of Paul Newman:A Life,and Laurie Jacobson.The rest,H’wood Confidential and Cheesecake on the Side,are attributed to outlets I simply cannot find any independent trace of. Maybe a social media account?Her daughter's own memoir, published the same year through the same small outfit, carries a similar pattern of blurbs.
Part Three: The Affair Story — A Media-History Timeline
The story's journey is genuinely interesting from a media-studies angle: how does a once-obscure tabloid item resurface, decades later, and get treated as settled fact? Here's the timeline I was able to reconstruct.
1.1969 the original source ——MY SECRET LOVE AFFAIR WITH PAUL NEWMAN
This is the name of her article.I couldn't identify the original publication. Bacon's own writing ties her story to Joyce Haber’s gossip columnist.Joyce Haber ran an item claiming the Newmans were splitting up, and the couple responded with a widely-discussed half-page ad in the Los Angeles Times. She wrote that she was the woman Joyce Haber did’t mention in the item.I went back and read the actual archived pages. Haber's item is genuinely vague, and it's buried among a handful of other rumors — you can even spot a mention of Faye Dunaway sandwiched right in there! What I did turn up was a follow-up column Haber wrote a few days after the ad ran, describing getting mobbed by reporters at the airport. Comparing these primary documents to Levy's account also turned up two small factual slips in his book: the ad didn't run "the next day," as he writes, but three days later.
I went hunting on eBay for old vintage magazines, hoping to track down whatever publication had originally run Nancy's 1969 piece — no luck there. But I did stumble onto a few other pretty interesting finds along the way.There's a 1970 issue of Confidential with a cover line reading "What Paul Newman's Other Women Like," and in the interior pages the seller had photographed, there's a photo of Nancy with Rod Taylor — the same photo that later turns up in her own book. So this thing did get some coverage in other magazines at the time. But given that Confidential was already on its last legs by 1970, this particular story probably didn't register with anyone.There's also a magazine called The Exploiter— a 1971 issue with a cover blaring "PAUL NEWMAN'S PLAYMATE TELLS DETAILS OF AFFAIR: 'PAUL SAYS HIS WIFE JOANNE WOODWARD WILL NEVER, EVER SATISFY HIM AGAIN,'" and right there on the same cover, cannibal-related content. Taken together, it really seems like whatever gossip coverage he got back then was confined almost entirely to the bottom-feeder tabloids.
2.1975 Stars in My Eyes…Stars in My Bed
Stars in My Eyes... Stars in My Bed (Pinnacle Books, 1975) is Bacon's own tell-all memoir, and it's essentially where the Newman story first got compiled into book form — the original 1969 magazine piece, reworked and folded in alongside a whole roster of other alleged romances. The book claims flings with a long list of names, including Errol Flynn, Rod Taylor, Tommy Smothers, Vince Edwards, and Hugh O'Brian, and touches on friendships and with an even wider cast — Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Judy Garland, and Sean Connery, among others. Bacon later published a few romance novels through the same house, apparently without much commercial success. One small but telling detail: surviving used copies for sale online are marked with remainder marks on the stamp. That's circumstantial, but it suggests this book didn't fly off shelves, and maybe that this particular story never made much of a splash at the time either.
3.1975-2008 a long silence
As far as I can tell, nothing. No magazine coverage, no follow-up reporting, no mention in any Newman biography-including Lawrence J Quirk( He came from actual Hollywood-journalism lineage: his uncle was James R. Quirk, the legendary editor of Photoplay, the magazine credited with essentially inventing the modern fan-magazine format) ,in this book,he criticizes both Newman and Woodward without any restraint, often in remarkably catty terms, and even goes so far as to confidently include an anonymous claim that Newman was gay, apparently never came across this story either. Nobody online seems to have discussed it.It's as if it simply didn't exist in the public record. If anyone reading this remembers seeing this story circulate at the time, or has a parent or relative who did, I would genuinely like to hear about it. And her supposed affairs with other stars don't seem to be corroborated by any third-party source either.
4.2009-resurfacing
The earliest dated coverage I could locate maybe is National Enquirer's that spring, shortly followed by Levy's biography. Once Levy's book picked it up, the story's public profile jumped a full order of magnitude- this is really the moment it entered the mainstream record.
5.2017-the memoir reissue
Discussed above.
6.2022 - an "alleged" infidelities, and the death of the author
After the HBO documentary The Last Movie Stars aired, public sentiment toward the marriage seemed to shift noticeably-visible in Reddit threads and comment sections alike.The apparent trigger was a moment where Nell Newman, one of Paul's daughters, recalls finding a book in a bathroom drawer written by someone her father had an affair with,and she says "And I remember,you know,there's a terrible moment there you know realize that your parents-or your dad is fallible."Nell doesn't name who wrote it or specify a title, but the on-screen text matches Bacon's article.But this moment raised more questions for me than it answered:WHEN did she find it? WHY was it there? WHO bought it? HOW would she have confirmed the connection at the time, versus retroactively? Ironically, HBO's own official episode synopsis uses more careful language than Nell does on camera- describing "alleged" infidelities, not confirmed ones. What's striking is that the documentary itself was clearly not trying to brand the couple as frauds - quite the opposite, its stated aim was to show two flawed, human people behind the golden-couple myth. But once released, that's not entirely how it landed. Scroll through any post-2022 discussion of the couple-forums, YouTube comments, wherever-and you'll find people invoking the affair to mock the marriage outright. It seems like some viewers have treated the documentary itself as some kind of "smoking gun" evidence. Under photos or videos of the couple, when someone brings up their "golden couple" reputation or quotes that famous "steak/hamburger" line, you'll often see comments like these: "Good quotes but he still cheats.Cheaters never change.""Once a cheater,always a cheater."Hollywood,they all cheat...""He is.A famous cheater."If cheat WITH you,then'll cheat ON you.Though he alcoholic and unfaithful"Their children told a heartbroking story."Don't believe in what you see."Tell this to his first wife.""Now we know they are acting."...The filmmakers clearly didn't intend that reading. But once a work is out in the world, its creators don't get to control how it's read.
THE AUTHOR IS DEAD, so to speak.
