PAUL NEWMAN: A Life, by Shawn Levy. Harmony; 490 pages; $29.99.

There was an intriguing duality about Paul Newman. He was always quick to make fun of his blue eyes, and the fuss that was made about his good looks. He knew that those things had nothing to do with his acting, but a great deal to do with his stardom. Usually, he’d make a crack on the order of, “If I had brown eyes, I’d still be in Cleveland.”

But each interview in which he voiced these sentiments was always accompanied by a new, full-face close-up that enabled the reader to get lost in those blue eyes that Newman spent so much time pretending to resent.

Part of this was just a movie star tending to the franchise, but it also captured an essential conflict within the man, one that he papered over quite well. For Paul Newman was one of those men who managed to have it both ways: shy away from the narcissism of the acting profession from which he was not exempt, while taking advantage of the fact that he was greatly blessed by nature. At bottom, Newman always seemed slightly uneasy about being an actor. Not in any writhing, embarrassed way, but rather because it seemed insufficient.

Which is why he became such an expert driver of racing cars, why he threw himself into philanthropy after the Newman’s Own franchise, begun as a local lark in his home in Westport, Conn., inexplicably took off. Well, maybe not so inexplicably; the products were and are good. But let’s face it: People – millions of them – loved Paul Newman.

Shawn Levy’s new biography of the late actor won’t change that. It gives us more information about his upbringing as the son of the owner of Newman-Stern, a very successful sporting goods store in Cleveland, more details about his two marriages, and his various careers.

But at the end of the day, and the book, he’s the same guy you thought you knew – not just a good actor, but good company.

The truly interesting thing about Newman is that, for all of his renown and acclaim, he was far from the best actor of his generation. He couldn’t get close to either Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift, and I’ll bet he would have been the first to say so. But Clift was a sprinter, not a long-distance runner, and Brando was grievously damaged psychologically, i.e. borderline crazy.

Newman, on the other hand, was one of those rare men whose talent was unaccompanied by the gene for self-destruction. He worked hard to develop his skills, then worked equally hard to get the most out of the gift he had.

When he hit a fallow period in his acting career, he took up directing, and did well with performance-based pieces such as Rachel, Rachel and The Glass Menagerie. In this, he was similar to Burt Lancaster, another very handsome man untouched by genius, but who worked and worked and worked some more until he became the very best actor he could be.

Newman had his weak points. He wasn’t terribly good at romantic leads, and for a guy who was obviously a lot of fun to be around, he never made a really good comedy. Newman’s great gift was for solitary rogues. Sometimes they were redeemable (The Verdict) sometimes not (Hud, Cool Hand Luke), and sometimes their fate would be ambiguous (The Hustler), but he refused to stop there.

He played an uptight Midwesterner beautifully in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, he played beautiful losers beautifully (Slap Shot, Nobody’s Fool). And every once in a while, just to keep the franchise current, he’d do a big, gaudy commercial movie that had money written all over it (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Towering Inferno) and was bound to contain plenty of close-ups of that close-cropped curly hair, those arctic eyes.

Levy has written books about subjects as varied as Jerry Lewis and the Rat Pack, and he’s written as good a book as can be written about a man who didn’t cooperate and who told his friends and family not to cooperate. Beyond that, Newman’s life lacks primary conflict; he had his share of grief – he botched his first marriage, a son died of an overdose – but at bottom, he was a Nice Jewish Boy who became a Nice Jewish Man: a mensch.

I have a hunch that the book we should be reading was Newman’s autobiography, which could have been seriously good. Levy reveals that he began work on one with his friend Stewart Stern, who was also an excellent screenwriter (Rebel Without a Cause, Rachel, Rachel, etc.) but the project petered out. My guess would be that Newman was more interested in examining characters than in examining himself.

Levy has some valuable insights about the actor’s place in his time: “Newman’s body of work nicely encapsulated the history of an in-between generation of American men who helped their fathers and uncles conquer the world in war and commerce, but who could only watch – likely with some jealousy – as their younger siblings and their own children acted out on the native rebellious impulses to overturn everything.”

Newman’s life and talent encompassed both solid fathers and rebellious sons – the former in his life, the ragged, dangerous latter in his art.