It wasn’t his partner’s style. As Flaherty pointed out, “Mailer was after all still middle class, Jewish, and Harvard, a reader of Blake, Lowell, and Kierkegaard.” He told the assembled academics that the biggest issue facing the city was race relations, and former mayor Robert Wagner, who had just entered the race, was not equipped to deal with this. Then he quietly explained that it was “a spiritual necessity” to give all races, nationalities and interest groups, left and right, the chance to express themselves. “People are healthier if they live out their prejudices rather than suppressing them in uniformity,” he said. The audience sat “in ecclesiastical reverence as he did that of which only he was capable—convincing a collective body that the sadness in his soul was symbolic of the sadness in the land.” Flaherty was as moved as the audience and, ignoring the political odds, “swore to Christ Mailer was going to become the mayor of New York City.”
Besides the city’s becoming the fifty-first state, several other campaign ideas took root: free bicycles at city parks, a central farmers market offering fresh vegetables and fruit, citywide stickball competitions. A monorail around Manhattan, an old idea revived by Mailer and campaign associate Peter Manso, was refurbished and became one of the most discussed proposals of the campaign. One impossible scheme continues to be discussed. Mailer articulated it at Menora Temple in Brooklyn, where he said he felt at home among “real people,” rather than “phony liberals in Manhattan.” The idea was Sweet Sunday, based on a description that he had written in Provincetown: “One Sunday a month, all traffic would stop, all airplanes, all trains. It would be known all over the world that one could not enter or leave New York on that day. With luck, New Yorkers could get a hint of fields or sea in the breeze on Sweet Sunday.” He upped the ante by saying that electricity would be shut off, except at hospitals. Not everyone liked the concept. “What about refrigerators and air conditioning?” he was asked. “On the first hot day the populace would impeach me,” he said. As the campaign went on, Mailer developed a knack for disarming one-liners. One day at Brooklyn College when talking about the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was interrupted by a questioner who wanted to know what he would do if faced by a snowstorm like the monster that had tied up traffic in Queens for several days the previous winter. He shouted back, “I’d piss on it.” He began to get his share of laughs, and Breslin began to talk about issues.
There were lost opportunities and blunders. At Sarah Lawrence College before a notably feminist audience, Mailer described his power-to-the-neighborhoods plan. A young woman spoke up: “Where are the pigs going to live?” Mailer, Flaherty wrote, “made the mistake of putting on his whisky baritone Rhett Butler accent to reply. ‘Look, sugar,’ he began, and got no further as a chorus attacked him for the endearment.” As for Breslin, the campaign staff wasn’t worried as much about what he would say, but they were uncertain whether he would continue at all. Whenever he threatened to drop out, he was cajoled back by staff members, as well as Flaherty and Mailer. In response to the announcement that Mailer had won the Pulitzer for The Armies of the Night, Breslin was adamant about leaving, saying he couldn’t carry Mailer’s shoes, and only much handholding brought him around. At the formal announcement of candidacy at the Overseas Press Club, Breslin failed to show up at the appointed hour. Mailer, accompanied by Beverly, started without him. He began by saying that recently “candidates had become a little like the products put out by corporations.”
Well, Breslin and myself were not manufactured in large corporations. We were, in fact, put together by piecework. And if you wish to look at us as products, then think of us as antiques. Because we are sentimental about the past. We want New York to thrive again. We want New York to be a city famous around the world again for the charm, ferocity, elegance, strength, calm, and racy character of our separate neighborhoods.
When the television camera operators asked Mailer to stand on something so he could be seen over the cluster of microphones on the podium, he refused, saying that the city would have to learn to appreciate a man of his stature. Then he told them that he “would not deal in any deceptions, since his campaign slogan was ‘No More Bullshit.’ ” At that moment, Breslin, who “obviously had been on guard duty all night in some saloon,” showed up, and after some opening remarks castigated the reporters present for not giving the Mailer-Breslin ticket sufficient coverage.
In truth, the campaign received a disproportionate amount of coverage. “The press was horny with expectation,” Flaherty wrote. All five New York dailies, including The Wall Street Journal, wrote regular stories, so did the weeklies—the Voice, New York magazine, and Brooklyn Heights Press. National magazines—Look, Life, and Time—published features, and Women’s Wear Daily described Mailer as having “the grace of the Doge and the depth of Dante.” But the Times outdid all of them, devoting at least a dozen news stories entirely to the Mailer-Breslin ticket. At the height of the campaign, the Times Sunday magazine published Mailer’s most considered statement on why he should be mayor, “Why Are We in New York?” With few exceptions, the media loved the Jewish-Irish underdogs. “Vote the Rascals In” became as popular a campaign slogan as “No More Bullshit” and “I Would Sleep Better If Norman Mailer Were Mayor.”
Mailer’s second oldest child, Danielle, remembers the campaign well. She and her sister, Betsy, went to several events with their father. But most of the time when he was campaigning, the two girls were in school or with their mother. On weekends, however, they were usually at the Brooklyn apartment, where the maid, Hetty Diggs, was in charge when Mailer was away. One day an angry man showed up at the door. He had a gun, and said he was going to shoot Mailer. Hetty said, “Mr. Norman isn’t home,” and the man said, “Where the fuck is he?” She said she didn’t know. Danielle and Betsy remained silent and he left. When they told their father, he said calmly, “Oh, I wonder who he was.” But Mailer installed an intercom system, and no one could enter the building without being buzzed in.
The campaign had one near-ruinous evening followed a few weeks later by a day of redemption. On May 7, when Flaherty was convinced that enough nomination signatures had been gathered, a party was scheduled for the Village Gate, a large jazz nightclub. It had two purposes: raise campaign funds and give the hardworking staff a night off to meet the candidate, who had just signed his $1,000 Pulitzer Prize check over to the campaign. The momentum was positive and everyone was feeling good. Mailer sat at a “booze-laden table” with Bill Walker, recently out of prison and now his bodyguard. After Newfield and Breslin spoke, Mailer came to the stage carrying a glass of whiskey. Speaking in his southern accent, he began to berate the campaign staff, calling them “a bunch of spoiled pigs,” whose egos were undermining the campaign with “dull little vanities.” When he was interrupted, he shouted back, “Fuck You.” Mailer’s half-drunken harangue put the staff in shock. As Mailer was concluding, Flaherty saw Breslin heading for the exit. Mailer didn’t notice. He thought his speech had been a success and went home to bed. At four A.M., Breslin called Newfield on the telephone and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me I was running with Ezra Pound?” The next morning Flaherty went to Brooklyn to confront Mailer. He carried the morning Times, which contained a damning account of the evening.
Flaherty told him that he had been “genuinely scary” the night before, and that staff members were dismayed; a few had quit. As Flaherty quietly criticized his performance, Beverly entered the room, and Mailer said, “This guy is bullying me to death.” She replied, “I’m with him.” Then Flaherty asked why he had called the staff a bunch of spoiled pigs. “He looked unbelieving: ‘Did I say that?’ ” Beverly indicated that he had. “Tears welled up in his eyes, and he turned his head and buried it in the couch.” Flaherty told him that the staff could survive one bad night. Mailer visited headquarters that afternoon and was a “portrait of repentance.” For the rest of the campaign, Flaherty wrote, the candidate worked fourteen-hour days during a long hot spell, shaking hands at subways and speaking at
synagogues, social clubs, and street fairs. “Like the girl with the curl,” Flaherty said, “when he was good he was very, very good.” Mailer also cut back on the bourbon, imbibing only after the day’s work was done.
Perhaps the finest moment of the campaign came on Memorial Day. Like Breslin, Flaherty loved horse races, and the two of them put together a plan for the ticket to meet the crowd of seventy thousand gathered at Aqueduct for the Metropolitan Handicap. Mailer, dressed in a blue blazer, “his head a full-blown mass of curls, looked like the gentleman plunger,” with “a radiant Beverly” at his side. Breslin wore a bright pink shirt and a huge speckled tie. The threesome worked the festive crowd and got perhaps the best reception of the entire campaign. Flaherty had put together a single-sheet flyer with the “Railbird’s Picks . . . The Mayoral Handicap,” and it was given to every reporter in attendance. On it, former mayor Wagner, “a gelding” who “knows the track,” was the favorite, going off at 8–5. Ranged against him were the conservative city comptroller, Mario Procaccino, “Bronx Ridgling [a colt with undescended testicles], By Fear—Out of Law and Order,” Congressman James Scheuer and Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo, both “By Liberal—Out of Loser.” Going off at 20–1 was long-shot Mailer, “By Amateur—Out of Statehood, First-time starter, Good Barn.” Railbird listed him as “Best Bet.” In the actual horse race, the favorite was a three-year-old named Arts and Letters. “Such an omen,” Flaherty wrote, “was not lost on Mailer the Magician,” who put down a $90 bet and watched the chestnut colt come from behind to win. When Mailer saw him in the lead, he said to himself, “Maybe, maybe.”
Writing about the campaign later that year, Mailer said that he had awakened “on many a morning with the clear and present certainty that he was going to win.” Feeling guilty about sins that he does not name, he decided that he ought to be elected “as a fit and proper punishment.” On primary day, June 17, Breslin got 66,000 votes for City Council president and lost to Francis X. Smith; Mailer got 41,000. The Democratic mayoral race was won by the law-and-order candidate, Procaccino, with 33 percent of the vote. Wagner was second with 29 percent; Badillo was third with 28 percent; Mailer was fourth with 5 percent; Scheuer also had 5 percent but two thousand fewer votes. In the Republican primary, John Lindsay lost to conservative Congressman John Marchi by a few thousand votes, after which Lindsay decided to run in the general election as a liberal-independent in a three-way race against Marchi and Procaccino. As liberal a Republican as can be conceived, Lindsay proceeded to defeat the two conservatives, getting 42 percent of the vote. It has been argued that if Mailer had not run, his votes might have gone to Badillo, who then could have defeated Procaccino. By keeping the liberal Badillo out of the general election, Mailer may have enabled Lindsay to win. Flaherty asks in his epilogue, “Did Mailer save the city for liberalism?” Inclined to say no, he nevertheless leaves the door ajar on the question of whether the two rascals kept the nation’s largest city out of conservative hands.
Perhaps more important than the help provided Lindsay was the fact that Mailer and Breslin tried to change the nature of political debate. Theodore H. White, author of The Making of the President series, who was living in New York during the election, said that while he didn’t vote for Mailer, he felt his campaign to be “considered and thoughtful, the beginning of an attempt to apply ideas to a political situation. The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we’ve been producing is footnotes.”
MAILER HAD BEEN prepared to give up writing and work an elected official’s long days for the rest of his life, as he says in the opening pages of Of a Fire on the Moon, his third consecutive book written in the third person personal. “He would never write again if he were Mayor (the job would doubtless strain his talent to extinction) but he would have his hand on the rump of history, and Norman was not without such lust.” But he lacked “any apocalyptic ability to rustle up huge numbers of votes.” His foray into politics, like his filmmaking, confirmed that writing was his métier—not that he had given up on Maidstone, far from it. But he had to separate himself from filmmaking for a time, and in late June he traveled to Houston to begin work on the moon shot book. He hardly had time to say goodbye to his wife.
Beverly appears several times, briefly, in Managing Mailer, usually in the role of supportive spouse. In the one place that Flaherty characterizes her, he says she was “an earthy woman who, like Breslin’s wife, would rather tend to the privacy of her home and children than get involved in the public limelight.” But according to Mailer, the limelight was precisely what Beverly sought. “In the early days, she was marvelous,” he said. “She made a home for my boys, and earlier, for my girls.” But after a few years, he continued, “It turned south.” The chief reason was that “she gave up acting too soon. And it ate at her, it ate at her, it ate at her. We did okay for a while; we used to have wonderful parties and stuff like that. It wasn’t enough for her. And I didn’t know what to do.” He arrived in Texas with the impending breakup of his marriage on his mind. “It was impossible to believe,” he wrote in Fire on the Moon, “but they each knew—they were coming to an end. They could not believe it for they loved their two sons as once they had loved each other, but now everything was wrong. It was sad.” Aquarius and Pisces—as he referred to himself and Beverly—had met on a night when the moon was full.
She was extraordinarily sensitive to its effects; she was at best uneasy and at worst unreachable when the moon was full. Through the years of their marriage Aquarius had felt the fullness of the moon in his own dread, his intimations of what full criminality he might possess, had felt the moon in the cowardice not to go out on certain nights, felt the moon when it was high and full and he was occasionally on the side of the brave. And she was worse. Call her Pisces for the neatness of the scheme. Beverly born of Pisces. She was an actress who now did not work. An actress who does not work is a maddened beast. His lovely Pisces, subtle at her loveliest as silver, would scream on nights of the full moon with a voice so loud she sounded like an animal in torment.
Aquarius and Pisces communicated poorly over the next two months as he moved through his journalistic chores at the NASA Manned Space Center in Houston, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Kennedy, formerly Cape Canaveral, Florida. When they spoke on the telephone, one or the other often hung up in the middle of a heated conversation. Aquarius, a political also-ran suffering through an all-but-concluded marriage, had a diminished sense of self, despite his recent accolades and prizes. He likened himself to a “disembodied spirit.” It was, however, the perfect condition—“detached from the imperial demands of his ego”—to puzzle out an approach for writing about the huge, audacious program to put a man on the moon. Mailer found Apollo 11 to be a “spooky” enterprise, apparently transparent, but ultimately mysterious.
Shortly after he signed contracts for his account of the moon shot, an article appeared in the New York Times under the headline, “Million Advance for Mailer Seen.” The seven-figure number was a gross exaggeration by his agent, and Mailer was upset. He was distressed about having such huge attention drawn to a book he hadn’t yet figured out how to write. In actuality, Life would pay $100,000 for three installments; Little, Brown, his new publisher, guaranteed $150,000 for the hardcover version; New American Library matched this amount for the right to publish the paperback. Scott Meredith was quoted as being “quite positive” that foreign and subsidiary rights would bring the figure to $1 million by the time the book was published in January or February 1970. He was wrong about the sum and the date, but from then on Mailer was known as a million-dollar writer. The article also stated, correctly, that he would begin the book in July, and would again use his own participation. It noted that he would describe the July 16 launch and would also include “a chapter on the philosophical and technological implications of the moon landing.” As it turned out, the exploration of these implications would comprise the better part of t
he 180,000-word book, Mailer’s longest since Naked and the Dead.
If Mailer had the advantage of an engineering degree to help him understand the physics of rocket science, he also faced obstacles that other reporters did not, all self-imposed. Most of the reporters covering the moon shot would be there for a few weeks, write their reports using NASA handouts and quotations from controlled interviews with the astronauts, and move on to another assignment. For Mailer-Aquarius, it was a matter of professional pride: “if you’re gonna be paid a huge sum for it, you’ve gotta come back with something.” The book also gave him the chance to explore his obsession with the “disease of technology,” one of his major themes since Cannibals and Christians. Consequently, soon after his arrival in Houston, although he was “tempted to take a shortcut,” he saw that he could not merely write about the hoopla of blast-off and provide folksy tidbits about the astronauts. “That would have been a cheat,” he said. His mission was to write about “certain metaphysical problems” associated with the “technological sacrilege” of rocketing humans to the surface of a dead moon, a surface beneath which no humans were buried.
Everyone in the country knew the names and faces of the three astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, but little more of consequence. Life’s editor, Thomas Griffith, had agreed to arrange for Mailer to be given access to them but, as Mailer recalled, NASA refused because it was “afraid he would write harsh things” about them. Mailer then wrote a letter to the astronauts saying, “You wouldn’t let a commercial pilot fly Apollo, why not let someone who is recognized as one of the better journalists in the world meet you in order to write about you?” Armstrong wrote back and said, “Your argument is lucid and convincing but the answer is no.” Through the magazine’s Houston connections, he was able to spend an evening with Charles “Pete” Conrad, who would command Apollo 12 on the next moon mission. Conrad said that although Mailer had a reputation of being on the left, while he himself flew “right wing for Attila the Hun,” they got along, helped by the better part of a bottle of scotch.
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