Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  According to Adele, “I didn’t exactly nag Norman about getting married, but I would introduce the subject at every opportunity.” But Mailer felt she had reservations, as did he. Similar in age, New York City backgrounds, and hair-trigger tempers, they were different in education, and worlds apart in ambition. Before their children were born, sex was the strongest bond. Finally, they took the leap. He arose late on the morning of his wedding and then sat naked on the bed writing in his notebook. She stifled her annoyance, thinking, “after all, I was in love with a great writer, and living with genius had its price.” At the City Hall ceremony, witnessed by Barney and Fan, Mailer gave Adele a $13 ring, later replaced by a gold band. After the wedding, he carried Adele over the threshold, and said: “Well, Mrs. Mailer, it’s the beginning of a new chapter.” The next day he went to work at his studio in Brooklyn.

  Several days later, Dan Wolf and another First Avenue neighbor, Toby Schneebaum, planned a party back at the flat. Besides the Lindners, a number of literary friends came: the Rinehart crowd, Lillian Hellman, Harvey Breit, who wrote about literary matters for The New York Times and summered in Provincetown, Ed Fancher, Rhoda Lazare, and James Jones. Jones got drunk, as did Toby, who took a bath in the tub Mailer had installed in the kitchen. Adele, “happy because I was Mrs. Norman Mailer,” cut the cake with Toby’s machete.

  At the time of the wedding, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, adapted from Herman Wouk’s novel, was an enormous hit on Broadway. It was directed by Charles Laughton and produced by Paul Gregory and starred Henry Fonda. Tickets for the show, which ran for over a year, were difficult to obtain. Hoping to capitalize on its success, Gregory got in touch with Mailer to see if he would be interested in dramatizing Naked and the Dead. Mailer was dubious for three reasons: Lillian Hellman had taken him down this road, and it had gone nowhere; he didn’t want to take the time to work on the adaptation; and Gregory had praised Naked as “an extraordinary story of the Marines,” adding that he’d read it five times. Lying was bad enough, but mixing up the two service branches nearly destroyed Gregory’s credibility. But the opportunity to work with Laughton, whose acting skills Mailer admired, was tempting. If the deal went forward and made anything close to the huge sums Wouk was earning from The Caine Mutiny, that would be splendid, but whatever happened, he wanted to try another line of work, perhaps as some sort of factotum in prison administration. But first, he had to finish The Deer Park.

  WRITING ON APRIL 30, he told a Hollywood friend, Chester Aaron, that “by dint of pushing, nudging, sandpapering, worrying, and as my ex mother in law used to say—gidgying,” the novel would be ready in two weeks for final typing, which he planned to do himself. Aaron was thinking about getting married and Mailer gave his friend some advice on what he called “a monster of an institution.” Live together, not just sleep together, for at least six months, he said, because a good part of marriage is “the whole business of congenial room-mates.” He went on to fault himself for being “old Polonius Mailer,” especially because “I’m often convinced I’ll be married six times in my life.” Adele didn’t like to hear her new husband talk about future marriages, he said. Neither of them could have known that his prediction would prove accurate.

  By this time, he had shown the novel in near-final form to someone at Rinehart, probably Amussen, because he told Fig that “they” liked it, but it is clear that the manuscript had not yet reached Stan Rinehart’s desk. He repeated his news to Lew Allen and for the first time in months sounded upbeat, in part because Jones was back in town. Mailer was unequivocal: “Life with Jonesie has been great,” he wrote; “with that loud brawling animal quality of his which loves life so instinctively and so warmly, I begin to feel a little warmer myself.” When Jones is around, he continued, “you have the feeling that things are going to happen, as indeed often they do.” He gave this example:

  There was a party at Styron’s last night, and we all got drunk and decided to send a telegram to [Senator] Joe McCarthy. So here’s how it went:

  DEAR JOE, WE DIG YOU, BUT GET THE BROWN OUT OF YOUR NOSE! VANCE BOURJAILY, JAMES JONES, NORMAN MAILER, JOHN PHILLIPS, WILLIAM STYRON.

  Despite our mirth and our drunkenness, I think deep down we were a little aghast. It’s exactly the sort of thing you go to a concentration camp for three years later.

  The Jewish catastrophe theory of history, learned first at his mother’s knee, was never far from his mind, especially when things were going well.

  The Mailers had hoped to leave for Mexico on June 1, as soon as he typed and submitted the final manuscript to Rinehart for copyediting. But before he began, he learned that the rough manuscript submitted earlier, and carrying the unambiguously glowing endorsement of Amussen, had been read by his boss. “Something in the sex has gotten a neurotic hair up Stan Rinehart’s ass,” Mailer wrote to Charles Devlin. He met with Stan and they had an argument, but a decision on the novel’s fate was postponed until Rinehart saw how Mailer had handled his objections. Mailer figured it would take him about two weeks. By May 28 he had starting typing, about the same time he learned that he had “a lousy liver,” an after-effect of his wartime jaundice. The doctor said no alcohol—he had been drinking too much anyway—or fried foods for thirty days. No prohibition against marijuana was mentioned, and it became his substitute for Scotch. It would soon become his drug of choice and, within two years, his secret weapon in his war against “the shits” running the country.

  As the struggle with Rinehart was unfolding, Mailer heard from Lois Wilson. She would be passing through New York in early June. Could he suggest places and methods for “fancy indiscretions”? She was eager to see him again because “when I think of quality I think of Norman,” adding that among her colleagues “there’s not a decent piece of ass.” He wrote back immediately to say that he was borrowing a friend’s apartment for their reunion. Bring along the Polaroid photos you took last time, he said, because “as the years go by, I just get dirtier and dirtier.” At loggerheads with his publisher, weakened by a bad liver, and preparing for a four-month trip to Mexico with his bride of a month, Mailer was nevertheless eager to “put both my arms around your big white moon.” As he had foreseen, marriage would not interfere with the desires of this “gallant bucko.”

  Around June 10, Mailer placed the novel in the hands of Amussen. It had taken him thirteen consecutive days to type, and was the last time he would type a long manuscript. The fellatio scene remained intact but, as he explained to Lindner, “I took the descriptive edge off it so the reader will have no more than a sense that something perverted happened.” Even a few years later, certainly by 1960, the description (taken from the Rinehart proofs) would hardly arch an eyebrow.

  Tentatively, she reached out a hand to caress his hair, and at that moment Herman Teppis opened his legs and let Bobby slip to the floor. At the expression of surprise on her face, he began to laugh. “Just like this sweetie,” he said, and down he looked at that frightened female mouth, facsimile of all those smiling lips he had seen so ready to be nourished at the fount of power and with a shudder he started to talk. “That’s a good girlie, that’s a good girlie, that’s a good girlie,” he said in a mild little voice, “you’re just an angel darling, and I like you, and you understand, you’re my darling darling, oh, that’s the ticket,” said Teppis.

  Mailer had his reunion with Lois Wilson on June 13, and four days later left for Mexico. “Things at Rinehart turned out beautifully,” as he wrote to Lindner in mid-July. All the young editors had given enthusiastic reports on the manuscript, and there was no showdown with Stan, who apparently did not want to buck the entire editorial department. Instead, he “retired into sulky silence.” The Deer Park was accepted as submitted. A publication date of February 1955 was set. Except for reading galleys, nothing remained to do on the novel, and he again asked Lindner about helping him get a prison job. He was looking ahead and feeling good enough to have a few drinks and relax the strict diet he had been on for six weeks. He was s
moking “tea,” as he referred to it, almost every day. In Mexico he and Adele settled in a fortresslike colonial house surrounded by three-hundred-year-old trees. There was an interior garden with orchards and a large patio. He wrote his Japanese translator, Eiichi Yamanishi, that Adele painted and he studied Spanish and read books about crime and prison. Bea dropped off Susan regularly to visit and she was “a bright spot” in his day, although he worried that his anxieties might make her neurotic.

  Stan Rinehart’s distaste for the novel was mildly unsettling, but the silence of friends was painful. He had yet to receive any response from Adeline, Malaquais, Styron, Jones, or Devlin, all of whom had been sent copies, nor from his publishers in England, Germany, or Japan. In an anxious mid-July letter to Styron and his new wife, Rose, he said he had “an uneasy feeling” that they had not commented because they surmised that doing so “would alter our friendship.” A few days later, a four-page, handwritten letter from Styron arrived. After stating straightaway that the novel was “honest and brilliant,” and agreeing with Robert Loomis, his own editor, that it had “a deep sense of morality,” Styron shifted gears and worked his way painstakingly through a run of qualifications and small praise, noting, for example, that the novel was “depressing in its magnificent candor,” and that it was brimming with “unalleviated and leaden anxiety.” He concluded: “I don’t like the book, but I admire the hell out of it.” Styron also thought that O’Shaughnessy didn’t come off well as a narrator.

  When Mailer replied, he said that he “truly appreciated” the critique, and that his own reaction would probably be the same “if hypothetically someone else had written it.” His tone in a number of letters during this period was muted and agreeable; he would raise no passionate defense of the novel. I was attempting to write a great novel, he said to Styron, one that had the same kind of dry irony found in Stendahl’s The Red and the Black, but “my imagination and my daring and my day to day improvisation dried up.” Nevertheless, he said, his vocation as a writer has been confirmed by surviving the “progressively more depressing” process of writing his second and third novels over the previous five years.

  Besides his parents and sister, his main supports were Lindner, Wolf, and Adele. The Gwaltneys read the manuscript when the Mailers stopped on the way to Mexico, and were enthusiastic in their praise. Wolf was a staunch admirer. Lindner—the first person outside the family to read it—offered to write a preface and later wrote a glowing review in The Village Voice. Until his untimely death in 1956 at age forty-one of congestive heart disease, he maintained a rich dialogue with Mailer and deeply influenced his emerging conception of the rebel hipster Mailer would call “the white negro.” Adele, Mailer recalled, read everything that he wrote. “Because I loved him,” she wrote in her memoir, “I handed everything over, my heart, my body, and my talent.” He said that she was a sensitive reader and he always valued her opinion. “She had instinctive good taste and she could spot all that was phony in a novel as fast as I could.” The novel is dedicated to her and Dan Wolf.

  In August, reports appeared noting that Naked and the Dead had been sold to Paul Gregory’s film company, and that filming would begin in July 1955. Robert Mitchum was slated for a starring role, the articles stated. In fact, the contract for the sale was not signed for another three months, and when the film was finally made in 1958, Mitchum was committed elsewhere. Mailer communicated with Cy Rembar about the contract while he was in Mexico, but with scant enthusiasm. His hunch was that the film would be much less powerful than the magnificent film version of From Here to Eternity, and he was right. Nevertheless, he wanted the sale to go through because his income from Naked was noticeably diminishing and, if Stan Rinehart’s gorge rose again, he said, he might have to publish The Deer Park privately at his own expense. A part of him almost hoped this would be the case.

  One of the things he had put off for the previous two years was reading the work of his contemporaries. So, in addition to reading crime books and going to bullfights, he began reading books “by the cartload.” He found little to admire. The only book that he liked was Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, which had just won the National Book Award. “I found it impressive but somehow unexciting. Really the damndest book—I have to admire his courage, his ambition, his ‘openness’ to try anything and everything, but the pieces are more exciting than the whole, and nothing in it really disturbs one.” For the next thirty years, Mailer had good and bad things to say about Bellow. The negative comments usually echoed what he said here, namely, that Bellow did not make his readers itch, and was too easily pleased by his ability to elegantly repeat the pieties and paradoxes of high culture figures such as Freud, Proust, and Henry James.

  HE DID SOME writing in Mexico, namely a short piece he had agreed to write for One: The Homosexual Magazine, after a telephone conversation with the New York secretary for the sponsoring organization. He turned him down at first, and the man countered by asking if Mr. Mailer would prefer to write anonymously, shielding his reputation, but still showing support for the aims of the magazine. Mailer wrote, “My pride was that I would say in print anything that I believed, but I was not ready to say a word in public defense of homosexuals.” He feared that his article would not be read widely, he said in a letter to the secretary, and that gossip columnist “maggots like [Walter] Winchell and [Lee] Mortimer will print a line—‘Norman Mailer writing articles for the limp-wrist set magazine One.’ ” It would then be taken for granted that he was homosexual, a disagreeable prospect. But he agreed to write the essay. The secretary clinched his approval by saying that if he did, perhaps he could be the movement’s first congressman. The man knew “the way to me,” Mailer wrote in a preface to the piece when he reprinted it: “Mate the absurd with the apocalyptic, and I was a captive.” In mid-September, after approving the galleys of The Deer Park with only a few minor corrections, he sat down to write the essay.

  The turning point in his views on gays had come after he read Toby Schneebaum’s copy of The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach by Donald Webster Cory. He resisted it as he read, but could not escape the recognition of his bias it provided. In his essay, which he titled “The Homosexual Villain,” he wrote, “I had been acting as a bigot in this matter.” As a libertarian socialist, he had always insisted that “sexual relations, above everything else, demand their liberty.” But he had been unwilling to grant this freedom to homosexuals. Wilhelm Reich in The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure, had first shown him the link, he said, between political and sexual repression, and now he was “properly ashamed.” He explained that he had consciously attributed “unpleasant, ridiculous, or sinister connotations” to gay or bisexual characters in his novels, most notably, General Cummings in Naked and the Dead and Leroy Hollingsworth in Barbary Shore. “I had no conscious homosexual desires,” Mailer wrote, but he was suspicious about his dislike of gays, wondering if it might be an unconscious cover for such feelings. Once he had admitted, and corrected, his bias, and begun to enjoy his friendships with men like Schneebaum, he found he was no longer worried about latent homosexuality. Lindner’s assurances also played a role.

  Dotson Rader, a writer and antiwar activist, met Mailer in 1967 and became a close friend. They had many conversations about homosexuality over the years. Rader said Capote thought Mailer was a latent homosexual, and told Rader, with fingers crossed, that he was afraid Mailer would rape him. “So when I was first with Norman,” Rader recalled,

  I would sort of bait him. And he never responded in a way that was negative. He always responded with humor. By baiting him, I mean, I’d lean over and say to him, “Did anyone ever tell you that you have beautiful blue eyes.” That kind of stuff; I would tease him as if I was coming on to him. Most homophobes would say, “Keep your hands to yourself,” which was kind of funny because bigots, when they react instinctively, in a bigoted way, usually get angry, but they’re really angry at themselves because they r
eveal their cards. Norman was never that way.

  A little over a week after he sent off the essay to One, Mailer heard from Amussen: Production was about to begin. There was nothing to fret about, he said, everything was “under control.” Mailer wrote to Styron the same day to congratulate him on buying a house in Connecticut and thank him for the invitation to visit. In all of his correspondence during his last few weeks in Mexico, he recites his uncertainty about selling Naked and the Dead to Hollywood. Being poor and having new experience foisted on him was his preference, yet the prospect of cashing his biggest paycheck since Naked was published—$110,000 plus a cut of the profits—had obvious appeal; he thought he could write three or four more books on the proceeds. Nothing was said about The Deer Park. It was finished, Mailer thought, and time to move on.

  Before he and Adele left Mexico, he had an extraordinary experience on marijuana. He told the story more than once in his later years.

  When the marijuana really hit, I went to the bathroom—I remember this—and vomited. Some of the most incredible vomiting I ever had. It was like an apocalyptic purge, the most unbelievable orgasm of your life except it wasn’t agreeable because it was vomiting. But it had the power of an apocalyptic orgasm. And when I came out of it, I was on pot for the first time of my life, really on. Up to that point, I just had intimations of what was on. Now I was on. Light deepened, things changed. I remember lying down, getting dizzy, looking at Adele who was sleeping off her pot on another couch; there were two parallel couches, and I could seem to make her face whoever I wanted her to be, just lying there. Her face would change from this person to that person. Probably could change her into an animal if I wished. And that was just the beginning. After that every night for a few weeks, I went down to the car, turned on the radio, listened to it, smoked pot, breathed it in in the car and got into jazz for the first time. For the first time in my life, I could really understand jazz.