Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  His largest regret about the book was the cover of Time, which he felt had hurt his reputation as a serious writer. Schiller recalled that shortly after the magazine appeared, Mailer either called him or saw him in person. “I remember him saying very strongly, ‘With that fucking Time magazine cover, I’m never going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.’ And he did say that to me just in those words.” Schiller wasn’t particularly bothered at first, but later “I remember it haunting me a lot of times,” he said. “I had not perceived how something could really hurt somebody who was very, very important.” Over the years, he said, “those words just ring in my ears, all the time.” Mailer’s memory is somewhat different, but not contradictory. Asked about Schiller’s recollection, he said, “I don’t recall saying that,” but admitted he might have had the thought. “I can promise you there are a good many things that are going to keep me from winning the Nobel Prize,” he said, “and that might be one of them, but that’s one item in a prime list of fifty or sixty items.”

  Mailer described his working relationship with Schiller on Marilyn with a Yiddish word, shidduch, a matchmaking or engagement. But “a shidduch made in Hell is the way it felt. Neither of us was very happy with the other, not at all.” Schiller felt the same. “I was done with Norman Mailer. He had fucked me over,” he said. They didn’t speak for over a year. Nevertheless, the collaboration set each of them on a new path. Schiller got into publishing in a big way. The following year, two books that he “produced” appeared: Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce! by Albert Goldman, and Muhammad Ali: A Portrait in Words and Photographs. For Mailer, Marilyn provided a way to use his experience less directly than he had in The Armies of the Night, while undertaking a life study on a larger scale than in his political and boxing profiles. Looking back a decade later he said, “All through the 1970s I just sort of staggered along feeling very confused.” Turning to Marilyn was useful, he said. “If you write a book about one person, it helps to focus what you think.” Over the next decade, he would write four more books of a biographical nature, all the while plowing ahead on the Egyptian novel.

  DURING THE SUMMER of 1973, Mailer spent several weeks in a rented house in Sorrento, Maine. Carol and all of the children were there, save Susan, who was in Mexico studying to become a psychoanalyst. Danielle recalled the routine of those summers: “We’d be in our bunks and Dad would come down with his army bugle and he would blow it a few times and he would say, ‘Drop your cocks, pick up your socks, now get out of your fart sacks, you bastards!’ And we’d get up and we’d have this elaborate choreography of tuna fish sandwiches and lemonade. All of us would be in gear and ready to sail. We’d go out in our Luders 16 and often would sit in irons for half the day.” She also remembered summer activities in Provincetown: “There was always some drama, something a little scary, something unpredictable. We used to take rides in the dunes in his Land Rover. We’d go up cliffs and do things that were really dangerous. Afterwards, we’d be shaking with fear, and Dad would say, ‘But don’t you feel virtuous having looked the Devil in the eye?’ ” He was also testing himself, Danielle said.

  Betsy recalled that at times her father was urging them “to do things that were challenging and scary and difficult and out of our comfort zone. And I would balk at that and complain and be angry at him and be scared. But in retrospect, and quite quickly after the fact, I would realize how invigorating it was that he pushed us to go out on the Luders boat, two or three of us.” He helped us “overcome our apprehensions and our sense of fear,” she said.

  In addition to the physical challenges, there were psychological ones, Michael Mailer recalled.

  We were away from our mothers; we didn’t have that sort of protective shield. If Dad pushed us too hard, we didn’t have somebody to fall back on to protect us, so to speak. I think that for him it was a way to test his child-rearing philosophies. From my standpoint, we got a lot out of it. It pushed me through my fears—I was a very fearful child and he knew that. He wasn’t always correct in his methodologies, but by and large, I think those summers allowed me to transcend those fears.

  Speaking at her father’s memorial in 2008, Kate added another dimension: She recalled the summer artistic pursuits: “One summer he gave us all movie cameras, to film, splice and edit our own creations. Another summer we were to work on scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire, cast and directed by him.” Her father said that all these pursuits were undertaken for the purpose of “improving our souls by going beyond what we thought we were good at.” All nine Mailer children have similar memories of summers in Maine.

  Earlier in the year, when Carol Stevens told him that she was uneasy about their relationship, he bought her a Tiffany wide gold band and gave it to her under a full moon. They considered themselves to be married, although he was not yet ready to start divorce proceedings against Beverly. He knew they would be difficult. Carol accompanied him to accept the MacDowell Medal at the writers colony of the same name in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Suzanne Nye, traveling separately, also came, and Carol began to suspect that she was more than an assistant. On the drive back to Maine, she confronted him. He admitted the affair. “As long as you didn’t know about her, everything was fine between us,” he said, which only made matters worse as far as she was concerned. “I had had it and wanted out,” Carol recalled, but the family was waiting for them in Maine, he was contrite, and she relented. Still angry, she flushed her gold ring down the toilet, but tied a string to it. Mailer fished it out and put it on his dresser.

  AT THE END of 1973 when The New York Times surveyed him and other celebrities on their New Year’s resolutions, Mailer’s reply was: “To work on a novel . . . just those five words, to work on a novel.” To aid him in re-creating the Egypt of three millennia past, Mailer turned to books on Egypt. One of his chief sources was E. A. Wallis Budge’s edition of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and prayers placed in the coffins of wealthy Egyptians. Mailer was gripped by the specifics of Egyptian embalming and burial customs, and their ideas of the afterlife. He was especially interested in the perilous journey that all souls had to make through a horrific underworld where monsters and demons threatened them as they made their way to final judgment by the dog god Anubis, who weighed each person’s heart. Those heavy with sin and crime were eaten by Ammit, a female demon, part lion, part hippopotamus, part crocodile. The good went on to heaven. He found Egyptian myths and customs to be a relief from American culture and saturated himself in all their gruesome complexity. He wrote to Richard Poirier in early March to say that after all the speed writing he had done over the previous decade, he was finding that “novel writing is hard—I move so cautiously.” He said that the novel was different “from anything I’ve done before, in style, matter, stance, nitty gritty. I think you’ll love it.” He was doing push-ups every other day, fifty to sixty sit-ups daily, and was planning to jog when the weather got warmer. Fasts, exercise, and less drinking (he gave up bourbon almost entirely) enabled him to get down to 165 pounds.

  Financial problems were still worrying him. “These days I pant after money in one heat after another,” he said. When he received an advance or large royalty check, he rarely escrowed a portion for taxes. The money went out immediately for mortgages, tuition payments, alimony, and child care. Consequently, he was always in arrears with the IRS. What made it worse was that someone in Scott Meredith’s office had spread the word about his deal with Little, Brown. “Now everybody thinks of me as a no-good rat-fuck millionaire,” he wrote in a long, complaining letter to Mickey Knox. He continued, saying that there were a dozen or more American writers making more than him—“I must include Mr. Vidal on this list”—but a perception was growing that he was “Mailer the radical who sold out.” Knox’s divorce and separation from his children led Mailer to comment on the damage to his own children from divorce. “There’s no kidding oneself,” he said, “something always gets lost in them, some little pinching off of some of their
higher possibilities.” The only consolation is that children do grow up, he wrote. Remembering the troubled marriage of his own parents, he said that he had finally comprehended why his mother had never left his father: “It was as if it would interfere with the largest particular work of her life, which happened to be me.” More marital problems, and the concomitant toll on the children, were on the near-horizon.

  After Molly Cook came to work for Mailer in 1972, she found herself dealing with “a lot of personal stuff, especially with Beverly Bentley, who was always fighting with Norman,” as her partner, Mary Oliver, who also worked for him, recalled. “Molly was always busy. Generally, she kept a bank account and kept records of what was paid out, ‘took care’ of the wives, made travel arrangements, took many phone calls asking what the caller wanted, then reporting to Norman.” There were calls from editors, journalists, and one of Scott Meredith’s chief associates, Jack Scovil, Mailer’s contact at the agency for many years. Oliver also recalled hearing from a range of celebrities: “Jackie O, Dick and Doris Goodwin, Plimpton, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, and so on.” As time passed, Mailer asked Cook to take on more and more. She established an excellent filing system for his correspondence and manuscripts, and dealt with fans, friends, and family. She and Mailer had some “terrible tiffs,” Oliver said, but established a close working relationship. Working for him was “very heavy duty.” He could be “brutal,” but he was also “a bright, tender, funny guy.” Oliver mainly typed his manuscripts (including parts of The Executioner’s Song and Ancient Evenings) and letters. Once, when he asked her to take on an onerous task, she said, “Deliver your own shit.” When Molly drove the kids to Stockbridge (smoking her pipe “incessantly” in the car, Michael remembers), Mary always came along. “I was backup,” she said.

  Sometime in February or March 1974, Larry Schiller called to say that he had a collection of interesting photographs of New York graffiti artists and needed some text. He offered Mailer $50,000 for an essay to accompany the photographs of Jon Naar, in a book designed by Mervyn Kurlansky. The book would be published as The Faith of Graffiti and in England as Watching My Name Go By. Mailer agreed to write a ten-to-fifteen-thousand-word essay for the book, which was to be published in early May, with a long excerpt appearing simultaneously in Esquire (Mailer said he allowed it to be printed there because Harold Hayes had left the magazine). He and Schiller “hardly spoke,” Mailer recalled, “not because we were cold, but because there was just nothing to talk about. It was understood that I’d write my piece . . . he could do what he wanted with the pictures.” They had little contact, Mailer said, but “we cooperated completely, almost as if to say, ‘This is really like a shakedown cruise for future material.’ ” Schiller remembered the situation the same way: “The ice had been broken for The Executioner’s Song.”

  The Faith of Graffiti may be Mailer’s least cogent major essay. He gives two chief reasons for admiring the work of the teenagers with spray cans, several of whom he interviewed briefly. First, their “masterpieces in letters six feet high on the side of walls and subway cars” are acts of transgression. Urban graffiti is another battle “in the long war of the will against the power of taboo.” To bolster his argument, he refers to Giotto, Raphael, Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, and ten other major artists, but makes no substantive connection between the graffitists and any of them. He admires the boldness of the young men from the ghetto who risk beatings from the transit police if caught with a spray can. The second reason for his esteem, like the first, begs the question of whether nicknames (“tags”) scrawled on public surfaces have any intrinsic merit or beauty. If their work had not been painted over as soon as time allowed, he speculates, then the face of New York “might have been transformed, and the interlapping of names and colors, those wavelets of ego forever reverberating on one another, could have risen like a flood to cover the monstrosities of abstract empty techno-architectural twentieth-century walls where no design ever predominated” over the lust for profit. Most did not agree, New York Mayor John Lindsay for one. When Mailer interviewed him, Lindsay made it clear that he was “the implacable enemy” of graffiti writers, not only because of the cost of effacing it, but because seeing new subway cars marked up inside and out “depressed people terribly,” Lindsay said. But Mailer’s faith in the essay never wavered.

  WHILE LIVING IN Stockbridge, Mailer and Carol got friendly with a local couple, the biographer Anne Edwards and her husband, Stephen Citron, who ran an inn called Orpheus Ascending. Carol had not done much singing for a few years, and when they invited her to sing on Friday nights, her “enormous black eyes which are deep and compassionate,” as Edwards put it, opened wide with anticipation. In her memoir, The Inn and Us, Edwards described Carol’s opening night. Mailer was sitting next to two loud, boisterous couples. When Carol began her first number, Mailer asked the man nearest him to lower the volume. The man paid no attention. Mailer began to get angry.

  Halfway through Carol’s third number, the man nearest Norman turned away from his companions and called out, “Is that broad stacked!” “Be quiet,” Norman ordered. “Sex-y!” the man continued. With that Norman turned to face the stranger, grabbed him by the ears and in a split moment had butted his own head so hard against the man’s head that there was a resounding craaaaack! The stranger was holding his head and moaning. Norman had turned back to watch Carol. She was a ghostly sight, unable to conceal the fear in her eyes as she raised the decibel level of her voice.

  The music stopped. A melee was in the offing. Carol told Mailer that if that happened she would never forgive him. Mailer and the man went outside. Carol was worried that the man might have a knife. She and Edwards waited, and then walked into the bar, where most of the patrons were gathered. “Standing in the center were Norman and the stranger, no longer a stranger, bear-hugging, toasting each other. ‘You have a hard head,’ Norman said admiringly.” The evening, just another night out for Mailer, ended happily.

  Sometimes Beverly, Michael, and Stephen would visit, occasionally staying overnight. Fan was also a regular visitor. One weekend when Fan, Beverly, and the boys were at the house, Carol was singing at another local nightspot, and Beverly stayed for her performance. According to Carol, there was a good deal of drinking, and when Mailer introduced Carol as Mrs. Mailer (as he always did), Beverly declaimed to the crowd that Carol was not Mailer’s wife; she was. Carol was mortified. Later, back at the house, Carol and Mailer had a fight, “the only big one we ever had.” Mailer, Beverly, and some of the local crowd were going to a late night party and Carol refused to go. As he was making a drink, he squeezed a lemon in her face and then shoved her. She fell down and banged her head. Fan heard the noise and came down from her bedroom. “She stepped right over me to see if Norman was all right,” Carol recalled. Mailer left to join Beverly and the others; Carol went to bed and locked the bedroom door. He was furious when he returned home and found it locked, and they did not speak to each other for a week.

  Another visitor to Stockbridge in the spring of 1974 was Richard Stratton, then an aspiring writer. Their conversations, which began then and continued through the summer in Maine, eventually became one of Mailer’s most important interviews, appearing in two consecutive issues of Rolling Stone the following January. They had met three years earlier in Provincetown when Stratton was a writing fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and doing carpentry on the side. He had read a lot of Mailer’s work, and it “changed my life,” he said.

  When I read “The White Negro,” I felt like Norman was writing about me. Because that whole thing of being brought up in the suburbs in a kind of air-conditioned nightmare . . . the malls, the malling of America, and the mediocrity of that life. I was rebelling against that from the earliest age. I went to reform school at 14; I was a juvenile delinquent. But I didn’t understand it until I read Mailer. I was rebelling against the aridity of that life, the blandness, and not taking risks. I was living it, and I think when Norman
met me, he saw that.

  On the spring night in 1971 that they met, Mailer was forty-eight, Stratton twenty-five. They watched a football game, drank Scotch and cognac, and stayed up until dawn talking about writing. Stratton recalled that Mailer told him that writing was a blessing, and that “the real joy is to discover some shard of truth on the page at the end of the pen.” He hired Stratton to build wooden tables for his son’s model trains, and gave him the keys to his Provincetown house so Stratton could keep an eye on it when he and Carol were traveling. Their friendship and frank conversations continued for the next thirty-five years.

  Stratton’s two-part Rolling Stone interview, accompanied by photographs by Annie Leibovitz, stands out for the breadth of matters discussed. Mailer comments on Capote’s In Cold Blood, praising its “elegiac tone,” but criticizing its lack of penetration into the minds of the two murderers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. And then, in a demonstration of his own abilities in this line, he provides an analysis of Charles Manson (the interview notes that Mailer and Stratton made a trip to the site of the Spahn Ranch that was Manson’s headquarters in California). Mailer saw something extraordinary in him: “If Manson had become an intellectual, he would have been most interesting”; he had “bold ideas, and he carried them out.” His personality was “Dostoyevskian” because he was “more psychopath than just about any psychopath and more of a hustler than any average hustler that’s come along.” To see him only as “an example of pure evil, unrestrained psychopathy,” he argues, is to miss the “Napoleonic” dimensions of his psyche. Vicious mass murderer, yes, but utterly devoid of worthy qualities, no. Reading this in 1975, a reader might have wondered if Mailer could even discover some humanity in Adolf Hitler.