Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s Fuck Hut Bed to Be Sold at Auction

By Kenzie Bryant

Paul Newman's memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, published posthumously in 2022, revealed many things about the actor's life and work, but one revelation from the book reverberated most intensely: He and his wife, actor Joanne Woodward, shared a "Fuck Hut," a place she created in their home for the sole purpose of reveling in each other's company. In the late actor's own words, one day he returned to the Beverly Hills home that he shared with Woodward to find that she’d fixed up a room off the main bedroom with a "thrift shop double bed."

"‘I call it the Fuck Hut,’ she said, proudly," Newman wrote. "It had been done with such affection and delight. 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."

Now, Sotheby's is offering the cast-brass and iron bed from the Fuck Hut in its auction, "The World of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman." The auction house estimates the frame will go for $500 to $1,000.

The Fuck Hut bed, available at auction on June 1.

Newman did not have an easy relationship with his status as a sex symbol. Growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, he recalled that "girls thought I was a joke," but that changed after he met Woodward. "Joanne gave birth to a sexual creature," Newman said. "We left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars."

The couple met while they were performing in Picnic on Broadway in 1953. At the time, Newman was still married to Jackie Witte, with whom he had three young kids, Scott, Susan, and Stephanie. Newman revealed that the affair was "brutal in my detachment from my family," and by the end of 1958, he had divorced Witte and married Woodward. The couple would go on to have three daughters of their own, Nell, Melissa, and Clea.

Newman passed away in 2008, while Woodward is now 93, and they were married for 50 years. Most of the items from the auction are from their family home in Westport, Connecticut, where they spent the majority of their time together. He wrote of their relationship, "There was a glue that held us together then, and through the rest of our life together. And that glue was this: Anything seemed possible. The good, the bad, and the wonderful. With all other people, some things were possible, but not everything. For us, the promise of everything was there from the beginning."

In addition to the Fuck Hut bed, Sotheby's is offering more than 300 individual items from the couple's lives. Among them are seven erotica-based titles that the couple acquired in the ‘60s after they were married, including The Joy of Sex, The Complete Book of Erotic Art, Volumes 1 and 2, and The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. There are props from their respective film sets, like metal shackles from Cool Hand Luke (estimated to go for $3,000–$5,000) and the red velvet dress worn by Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve ($600–$800). Several personal scripts will be available, including some from the 1990 film Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, for which Woodward was nominated for an Oscar. One of the scripts was annotated by Newman (Sotheby's shares that he wrote "what doesn't he understand" next to his character's dialogue on page 19, and elsewhere, "check novel.")

The auction is not all movie memorabilia and fuck huts, though. It's also political intrigue. Available for bidding will be a copy of President Richard Nixon's enemies list on which Newman is number 19 of 20. It comes complete with notes on the actor's "Radic-Lib causes" ($150–$250). Antique furniture, family photographs, racing collectables, and their fine decorative arts collection will also be available.

The exhibition opens at Sotheby's New York galleries on June 1.

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