Adlai Stevenson, a former governor of Illinois, had been the Democratic candidate for president in 1952 and 1956, and was defeated both times by Eisenhower. He wanted a third chance but did not actively campaign, saying he would accept a draft. He was the sentimental favorite of many Democrats, but several other candidates, most of them U.S. senators, were actively challenging him. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, the Senate majority leader, seemed at first the most likely to succeed, based on his experience and connections. But it was the youngest senator in the pack, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who would gain the nomination, and do so, in part, because of the qualities Mailer saw in him. He had neither the jowls of old wheeler-dealers like Johnson (Mailer said he looked like “a well-to-do small-town mortician”), nor the baggage of stout trade union supporters like Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. Kennedy was different. He was a glamorous figure, rich and handsome, with a sharp wit and great self-assurance. His most “characteristic quality,” Mailer said, was “the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death.” It was Kennedy’s boldness that most attracted him.
The Mailers leased the house on Miller Hill Road for the summer of 1960, where he planned to work on the Kennedy piece. On June 1, they drove to Provincetown with Danielle, Betsy, and the two poodles. Zsa Zsa got pregnant easily and Mailer, always dubious about any form of birth control, was not interested in having her spayed. Over more than a dozen years, she and Tibo produced thirty-four puppies. He enjoyed observing them and found much to ponder in Zsa Zsa’s habit of nipping at Tibo’s genitals, forcing him to sit until she regained her composure. In later years, he loved to tell what he called his “veterinarian story.” One winter day in Connecticut when it was snowing, Tibo and Zsa Zsa were outside, and he watched them as they engaged in the procreative act. He saw that they had seized up. Tibo couldn’t withdraw, and Adele was afraid they would freeze. With some difficulty, Mailer lifted up both dogs and carried them indoors where they were still “unable to disconnect,” as he put it. After a few futile efforts to separate them, he touched Zsa Zsa gently on her bunghole and, open sesame, they came unglued. He told the story with pleasure, and it always drew a big laugh. His jokes and stories were inveterately carnal, as was the store of similes and tropes he employed in table talk.
He continued working on his play and followed Kennedy’s campaign. Baldwin came for a visit, and they drank regularly in town with various local characters. Bill Walker and Lester Blackiston, two writers from Washington, D.C., were part of the group, as was Bill Ward, the editor of the Provincetown Annual, where Mailer had just published a short essay on Picasso. Seymour Krim, a Beat fellow traveler and scaled-down version of Mailer, came to Provincetown to see the writer that he so admired. Mailer remembered the summers of the early 1960s as “wild, absolutely wild. There were fights. It was an absolutely extraordinary period.” Bikers would come roaring into town on weekends, and there were parties on the beach. “At least ten times a summer,” he said, “you’d see the sun come up over the flats. The town had a sometimes rich and sometimes sinister sense of impermanence to it, too.” Liaisons started up and marriages broke down. Mailer’s own was on the brink.
Roger Donoghue, whom Mailer had met the previous year by way of Knox, also spent time at the Miller Hill house, where there were many parties. A former middleweight boxer, Donoghue retired from the ring after a fighter he knocked out in a 1951 Madison Square Garden bout died a few days later. The Mailers introduced him to Fay Mowery, a painter, who was visiting her brother Eldred in Provincetown. Soon after, they married. Donoghue gave Mailer some boxing lessons and Mailer helped him with a book he was trying to write. Donoghue knew Marlon Brando, and told stories about teaching him to box for his Oscar-winning role as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. Mailer was fascinated by Donoghue’s stories and easy Irish humor. He admired the Irish, Adele said. “I sometimes thought he really wanted to be Irish.”
A few years later he explained why he had so many Irish friends: “I’ve always loved the Irish and felt very close to them,” he said, because “The Irish have what the Jews didn’t have, and the Jews always had what the Irish didn’t have. The Jews have this funny knowledge that if you respect life enough, it’s going to respect you back. The Irish have never understood that. On the other hand the Irish have this great bravura, a style, an elegance.” One side of Mailer was drawn to the dutiful Jews; the other, more daring side, took pleasure in Irish characters like Donoghue and, a couple of years later, Brendan Behan, the dramatist and memoirist. Behan, who described himself as “a drinker with writing problems,” represented Mailer’s Dionysian side. His radical IRA past and rumbustious escapades were enormously appealing to Mailer, who later “blessed” Behan for teaching him to perform in public. Susan, then an adolescent, remembers her father arriving at the apartment with Behan and his girlfriend, Valerie Danby-Smith, a former intimate of Hemingway’s. It was seven or eight in the morning, and they were drunk and happy after a night of revelry.
One night that summer, Mailer and Adele were walking home after having drinks at the Atlantic House. It was a little after one in the morning, and when he saw a police car driving slowly by, he called out, impulsively, “taxi, taxi.” The two policemen in the cruiser were not amused, words were exchanged, and Mailer was arrested. At the station house, when they put hands of escort on him, he resisted. He described it in a letter to the New York Post a few weeks later: “I was afraid of a flip, afraid I would begin to hit a uniform. I had the sustained image of a summer or a year in cellular, and so I did no more; let us say that I was reduced by this caution to ducking, spinning, blocking and sidestepping.” This passive-aggressive behavior inflamed the two officers, and one of them, allegedly, hit him in the back of the head with his billy. It took thirteen stitches to close the cut. He was charged with public drunkenness and disorderly conduct and, rather than pay a fine and admit his guilt, opted for a June 23 bench trial, at which he represented himself. Disproving the canard that nonlawyers are unable to defend themselves in relatively straightforward trials, Mailer won a dismissal of the disorderly charge, but was found guilty of drunkenness. The judge said that Mailer “had enough to drink to act like a fool,” and reprimanded the police for being “thin-skinned.” Mailer was satisfied with the draw.
RIGHT AFTER THE July 4th holiday, he flew to Los Angeles. He wanted to get the feel of the city before the convention. Driving with Felker from the airport, Mailer said, “The only political writing I know anything about is Marx. I’m not exactly sure how to go about it.” Felker introduced him to some reporters, and Mailer found that he already knew some people there, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian, who would later join the Kennedy administration. Mailer’s name, of course, was well known. “The Democrats fascinated him, and they in turn were fascinated by him,” Felker recalled. When the convention was under way, he came up to Felker and said, “I know how to do this now.” “I had an epiphany,” Mailer recalled, “the day I saw Jack Kennedy arrive at the convention. He was in the back seat of an open car, his face suntanned, and there was a crowd of gays on the other side of Pershing Park, all applauding, going crazy, while the convention itself was filled with the whole corrupt trade-union Mafia Democratic machine. And I could feel these two worlds come together.”
Mailer (smoking again) had seventeen days to write his essay. Kennedy’s “prefabricated politics” bothered him, however, and he did not immediately decide on the stance he would take. Recalling the moment much later, he said, “I never saw Kennedy as a politician I was in agreement with. I saw him as an active agent, as a catalyst, if you will, who would accelerate a great many trends in American life.” Subsequently, Mailer was able to override his doubts and produce, for the first time in his life, a piece written with “deliberate political intention; I wanted to get a man elected.” He also feared that Kennedy might lose. If party workers “had eased up a little bit,” he sai
d, “Nixon might have won.” The 1960 presidential election was one of the closest in history, with Kennedy defeating Richard Nixon in the popular vote by just over 100,000 votes.
When Mailer was in the middle of writing what turned out to be a thirteen-thousand-word essay, Felker flew up to Provincetown to get an early look at it. “It was much better than I expected,” Felker recalled. When it was all but finished, Mailer got a bonus: Kennedy was in Hyannis Port for a few days, about an hour from Provincetown, and had agreed to an interview. On the appointed day, before meeting privately with Kennedy, he spoke with some of the others gathered in the living room of the senator’s waterfront home, including Schlesinger; Prince Radziwill, the husband of Lee Radziwill (Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister); Peter Maas, a writer who knew Mailer; and Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger. Everyone was dressed casually, but Mailer had worn a suit and tie and was uncomfortable in the heat. “Sweating like a goat, tense at the pit of my stomach for I would be interviewing Kennedy in a half hour, I was feeling not a little jangled,” and when introduced to Mrs. Kennedy, “I felt like a drunk marine who knows in all clarity that if he doesn’t have a fight soon it’ll be good for his character but terrible for his constitution.” She offered him some iced tea, and they chatted about Provincetown, which she had never seen.
She must, I assured her. It was one of the few fishing villages in America which still had beauty. Besides it was the Wild West of the East. The local police were the Indians and the beatniks were the poor hard-working settlers. Her eyes turned merry. “Oh, I’d love to see it,” she said. But how did one go? In three black limousines and fifty police for escort, or in a sports car at four A.M. with dark glasses? “I suppose now I’ll never get to see it,” she said wistfully.
(A year later Mrs. Kennedy, now the first lady, got her wish. Accompanied by Gore Vidal, whose stepfather had been married at different times to her mother and to Vidal’s, she spent a couple of days in Provincetown with a small Secret Service escort. She wore a blond wig and dark glasses but was still identified by the locals.)
In their conversation, what struck Mailer was something Kennedy said at the outset, which he found to be “altogether meaningful” to him, but otherwise irrelevant. Kennedy said that he had read his books, paused and continued, “I’ve read The Deer Park and . . . the others,” a remark that startled Mailer. In countless similar situations, the book invariably mentioned was The Naked and the Dead. “If one is to take the worst and assume that Kennedy was briefed for this interview (which is most doubtful), it still speaks well for the striking instincts of his advisors.” As it turns out, Kennedy was briefed by Salinger, who, in turn, had been prompted by Maas. According to Maas, there had been some reluctance to grant the interview in the first place, because “at that time in his life Norman was not viewed as Mr. Stability.” So Maas told Salinger that “if you really want him eating out of your hand,” tell Kennedy to refer to The Deer Park. “But string it out a little. The timing has to be just right.” Salinger, who was present for the interview, saw his boss deliver the line perfectly, and “Norman just melted.” They got along well enough for Kennedy to invite him to come back the next day with his wife, which he did. Mailer wrote later, “After I saw the Kennedys I added a few paragraphs to my piece about the convention, secretly relieved to have liked them, for my piece was most favorable to the Senator.”
Three weeks before the election, on October 18, the November issue of Esquire appeared, and “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was given wide attention. Pete Hamill, another Irish-American who became friendly with Mailer, was a young journalist at that time. Looking back, he said, “When it came out, it went through journalism like a wave. Something changed. Everyone said, ‘Uh. oh. Here’s another way to do it.’ ” Mailer had taken “political journalism beyond what the best guys—Mencken, Teddy White, Richard Rovere—had done. Rather than just a political sense there was a moral sense that came out of the piece.” Felker and Hayes also were impressed: “It made an enormous impact and caused a lot of young writers to begin to think about politics,” Felker said. Hayes added that the essay “set the tone for many, many things to come for him, and for us.”
Arthur Schlesinger said he had “a vague memory that Kennedy was rather pleased” with the profile. Mailer only learned of Kennedy’s reaction much later, but shortly after the piece appeared, he received a four-page handwritten letter from Jacqueline Kennedy expressing gratitude for his essay. “I never dreamed that American Politics could be written about that way—why don’t more people have the imagination to do so,” she asks, and then answers by saying, “I know why—the poor things don’t have the talent.” She then assured him that her husband had indeed read The Deer Park; she remembered clearly the room where he finished it on a rainy day the previous fall, as well as her own reading of it. Perhaps he and his wife could visit them at the Kennedy compound next summer, she added. Reading this, Mailer began to imagine a role he might play in the new administration.
In her letter, Mrs. Kennedy does not refer to any specific passages in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” but the following scene could certainly have been one of those that elicited the wonder she felt. It is a description of Kennedy’s arrival at the Hotel Biltmore, seen from Mailer’s vantage point on an outdoor balcony of the hotel.
The Kennedy cortege came into sight, circled Pershing Square, the men in the open and leading convertibles sitting backwards to look at their leader, and finally came to a halt in the space cleared for them by the police in the crowd. The television cameras were out, and a Kennedy band was playing some circus music. One saw him immediately. He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards. For one moment he saluted Pershing Square, and Pershing Square saluted him back, the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street, one of those very special moments in the underground history of the world, and then with a quick move he was out of the car and by choice headed in to the crowd instead of the lane cleared for him into the hotel by the police, so that he made his way inside surrounded by a mob, and one expected at any moment to see him lifted to his shoulders like a matador being carried back to the city after a triumph in the plaza.
“Superman” is a classic piece of reportage and a foundation stone of the New Journalism not least because of Mailer’s skill with long periodic sentences. They take us through the scene as if we are watching an overhead tracking shot in a film, while giving hints of the emotions felt not only by the writer (here designated by the indefinite pronoun “one” to emphasize his shared identity with the crowd), but by the crowd, the police, the TV camera operators, the “beggars,” the senator’s handlers, and Kennedy himself, the ski-instructor-prince-matador-movie-star who spontaneously elects to wade into the crowd. The consequences of the Democrats nominating “a great box-office actor,” he continued, “were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.” The fact that Kennedy was Irish-American did him no harm in Mailer’s eyes. When Kennedy came on the stage at the convention, a writer friend said to Mailer, “Sergius O’Shaugnessy born rich,” a remark that struck Mailer. Years later Mailer said that the reason he had “a great many Irish friends” was that he felt “some kind of instinctive link with them.” An oft quoted passage in the essay, which comes shortly after the description of Kennedy’s triumphant arrival, demonstrates the accuracy of Hamill’s comment about a new kind of political journalism:
Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.
The
two rivers came together in Kennedy, a canny, bold political operative ready to shake a thousand hands a day and spend his father’s money to win (with the help of his family) a string of nine primaries, but also a war hero with a vision for the future, funds of imperturbability, and looks as heart-piercing as the matinee idols whom Americans had loved and envied in the darkened movie palaces of the Depression and World War II.
Even after receiving Mrs. Kennedy’s letter and reaping congratulations all around on “Superman,” Mailer still had last-minute pangs. “The night Kennedy was elected,” he wrote, “I felt a sense of woe.” By presenting Kennedy as an archetype, a young King Arthur, Mailer felt he was “bending reality like a field of space to curve the time I wished to create.” He didn’t know if he was enabling an opportunist or bringing a hero into his own. Would Kennedy be the first hipster president, or just another politician? “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” Kennedy once said, and after he won the White House a number of people claimed paternity. Mailer listed several—Chicago mayor Richard Daley, J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Frank Sinatra, a strong supporter of JFK. Mailer said his “cool conclusion” that “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” had been one of the deciding factors “might be high presumption but it was not unique.” His contribution, he argued, had been to dramatize the race between the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon—“sober, the apotheosis of opportunistic lead”—and JFK, “a prince in the unstated aristocracy of the American dream.” He didn’t claim to have shifted 100,000 votes directly, but “a million people might have read my piece and some of them talked to other people.” His essay sparked the energies of Kennedy volunteers, “enough to make a clean critical difference through the country.”
Norman Mailer Page 34
