And Norman’s sitting in the car. He’s mad at me, and I said, “Norman, we got to do this.” I go knock on the door—same response. I say, “It’s raining Bessie, we’re out here in the goddamn rain. Norman just wants to sit and talk to you.” “No, no, no.” And if my memory serves me right, I said, “Bessie, Norman’s got to go to the bathroom. You know, he’s not a young man anymore.” “All right,” she says, “if he has to go to the bathroom.” She opens the door. And I make the decision not to go in. I’m not trying to make myself a hero. He’s writing the book.
While Schiller sat in the car, Bessie and Mailer had a long talk, the only face-to-face interview she gave, although she spoke many times on the telephone to both men. That day, Mailer asked her about the story that Harry Houdini was related to her husband, Frank, but her knowledge was “second-hand and rather fanciful,” Mailer said, “and all I could conclude was that Houdini being the father of Gary Gilmore’s father was a psychological reality in that family.” Gilmore’s father, who was much older than his mother, had been in show business for a time, but there was no hard evidence of a blood relationship with Houdini. The fact that she would discuss this with Mailer during the visit supports Schiller’s observation that “She loved Norman.”
Arranging to interview the widows of the men Gilmore killed, Colleen Jensen and Debbie Bushnell, was a challenge. Schiller didn’t want to contact them until it was known that Mailer was writing the book “because I knew that the Mormons might look upon me as a negative person—the guy who paid Gilmore’s family money, who’s going to make a hero out of him.” When Mailer’s participation became public, Schiller set up a reception in Salt Lake City for the attorney general, Mormon church officials, and other leaders. Mailer was the star attraction. After that, and probably because of it, the lawyers for the victims informed Schiller that the widows had agreed to be interviewed.
Looking back, Schiller said that he was nervous, as it was the first time he and Mailer were conducting interviews as a team. But as they prepared, he saw that Mailer respected his methods enough to have him take the lead. Mailer would give a sign when he wished to ask a question; otherwise, Schiller would run the interview. The separate interviews with the widows, delicate and emotion-laden, were each four hours long. When Mailer did ask a question, Schiller said, “it was so perfect and important—a question I could not have conceived of.” In their later collaborations, they often fought, but for The Executioner’s Song, at least in the early going, they worked together as smoothly as Holmes and Watson.
The interviews continued through the first half of 1978. All told, Mailer states in an afterword to the book, there were over three hundred separate interview sessions with over one hundred people. Some interviews went on for weeks. This total includes a number with lawyers involved in the case, which were conducted by Judith McNally, Molly Cook’s replacement, who would work for Mailer for the next twenty-five years. All together, the collected transcripts came to over fifteen thousand pages. Mailer had more material to work with than on any previous book. In a 1980 interview with John Aldridge, Mailer said that after leaving an interview with a woman, they were driving along, “and suddenly, Schiller, who has a passion for verification, started pounding the wheel and said, ‘She’s lying, she’s goddamn lying!’ Part of figuring out what happened was living with these interviews long enough to compare them to other interviews until you felt you could decide what probably did occur in a given situation.”
Schiller had always collaborated with other writers, providing raw material. But he retained the final say, and this had led to a falling out with a previous collaborator, Albert Goldman, who worked with him on the Lenny Bruce biography. Goldman called him a “voyeur” interested in “the most lurid, the most gross, the most hideous” things imaginable. In return for giving an interview, Schiller often insisted that negative comments like Goldman’s be balanced by a positive. For example, he invariably asked that the book he published by celebrated photographer W. Eugene Smith, Minamata: Words and Photos, be cited. Smith had been attacked and almost blinded by thugs hired by the Japanese chemical company that had discharged methyl mercury via wastewater into Minamata Harbor. Schiller became Smith’s angel and provided financial support and professional assistance so he could finish the book, one of the first photographic records of industrial pollution.
Producer David Susskind offered Gilmore $150,000 for the rights to his story, an offer that far exceeded Schiller’s $60,000, and he also offered to share profits in the film he planned to make. But Schiller had made it a point to send Gilmore telegrams and books, and to meet with members of his family, including, most importantly, Vern Damico, Gilmore’s uncle and appointed agent. Schiller spent time with Vern and his wife, Ida, and their daughters, Brenda Nicol and Toni Gurney, sat in their living rooms, and listened to their stories. He purposely made several spelling errors in a telegram to Gilmore, which allowed the convict to feel slightly superior to him, as he took justifiable pride in his language skills. Susskind was peppering Gilmore and Damico with telephone calls from New York, and at one point said to Damico, “Any contest between me and Mr. Schiller would be like the Dallas Cowboys playing the local high school.” When Schiller heard Damico repeat this line, he said, “Susskind is right, he is the Dallas Cowboys. But I’m suited up, I’m here on the playing field and ready to play. Where is David Susskind? I don’t even see him in the stadium.” Schiller won the rights. But Schiller also insisted that the victims’ families be compensated. Gilmore agreed, and they received $40,000 of his $60,000.
Mailer said that Schiller reminded him of Harold Hecht, the Hollywood agent and producer who had tried and failed to make a film out of The Naked and the Dead: “He wanted to do good work—wanted to raise himself in the estimate of the world, not be seen as an opportunist and an operator.” Mailer needed Schiller’s organizational abilities, his deal-making chutzpah—he called him in a later letter “one of the great wheeler-dealers of all time”—and his bottomless energy. “I owe him more than a little, because The Executioner’s Song would never have been nearly as big, and perhaps not as good as it is, if it hadn’t been for his skill in interviewing.” Schiller’s omnivorous information-gathering operation changed Mailer’s way of writing to some degree. He had always been proud of discovering truth at the tip of his pencil, but now saw that it would not be sufficient for capturing Gilmore and Nicole. He began to see that literary imagining could be more than just scouring his innards for original insights and waiting for prompts from the navigator. It could be exercised in other ways. Smelting a story from a mountain of facts, factoids, perceptions, hunches, and lies was one. Selecting the right narrative voice, or rediscovering one that had lain dormant for thirty years, was another.
ONE OF THE last of Gordon Lish’s accomplishments as fiction editor at Esquire (1969–76) was to convince Mailer to write a piece on television, “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots.” The essay sorted through Mailer’s experiences on programs going back to Mike Wallace’s Night Beat in the late 1950s. Mailer’s fight with Vidal on the Cavett show is the memoir’s focal point, although Mailer also discusses a number of other programs. Esquire was on the newsstands in mid-October 1977, about a week before Mailer attended a dinner party for visiting British publisher George Weidenfeld, the publisher of six of his books. Jason Epstein, editorial director at Random House, asked if Vidal, one of the firm’s authors, and his partner, Howard Austen, could join them after dinner, and the hostess, journalist and biographer Lally Weymouth, said of course.
In her column describing the party, Liz Smith called it “one of the grandest private parties ever tossed in Manhattan.” Weymouth, the daughter of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, invited about two dozen for dinner at her East 72nd Street apartment, and fifty for drinks afterward. Her mother came, and some good friends: CBS board chairman William Paley; Jacqueline Onassis, accompanied by architect John Warnecke; Pete Hamill; Barbara Walters; Cl
ay Felker and his date, Gail Sheehy; and lawyer–literary agent Mort Janklow. Rose and Bill Styron were there, as were Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag. Governor Jerry Brown of California came, as did some West Coast film people, including producer Sam Spiegel. British ambassador Peter Jay, a friend of Weidenfeld’s, was also present.
Before dinner, Mrs. Onassis asked Mailer some questions about fighting, according to Warnecke. “Norman, who has a theory about everything, began to expound on the subject. He said, ‘You must keep ice-cool.’ ” After dinner Vidal arrived as the guests were talking and drinking in the crowded living room. Mailer was in the kitchen, again in conversation with Onassis, when Norris told him of Vidal’s arrival. He went immediately to the living room and as soon as he saw Vidal, Janklow said, “he charged.” Mailer told a Washington Post reporter that he had “been looking for Gore for six years and last night I finally found him. When I saw Gore, I just felt like butting him in the head, so I did.” Accounts vary, but it seems that Mailer threw a gin-and-tonic in Vidal’s face and bounced the glass off his head. Mailer didn’t remember throwing a punch, but Vidal later told columnist Liz Smith, “Then came the tiny fist!” Janklow, who was talking to Hamill and Felker, said that Vidal “just stood there kind of frozen.” Then they scuffled, with Vidal grabbing Mailer’s lapels, and Mailer gripping Vidal’s arm so tightly that bruise marks remained for weeks. About this time, the hostess walked in from the kitchen, unhappy to see a fight at her party. “God, this is awful; somebody do something,” she yelled. Clay Felker, at ringside, said, “Shut up, this fight is making your party.”
Janklow grabbed Mailer, who was “flustered and genuinely angry. My interest,” Janklow said, “was to separate them so it didn’t degenerate into a brawl. Gore was stunned and his glasses askew. Then Gore’s companion, Howard Austen, started screaming and hollering, ‘Norman, you are nothing!’ Norman came forward again—he’s potentially dangerous—but I held him back. Gore didn’t say anything.” Sam Spiegel tried to quiet Mailer, and Vidal sat down on the couch at the other end of the room and used someone’s handkerchief to clean his bloody lip. Barbara Walters said, “To me the most interesting thing was that Mailer’s girlfriend, slim and tall and wearing a Grecian dress, stood there like a white obelisk with no expression on her face and said nothing.” Mrs. Onassis watched from the kitchen doorway. According to Warnecke, Mailer looked much the same, “taut and unruffled.” At this point, Mailer said, “Howard [Austen] came up to me and said he would fight for Gore. I said, ‘My fourteen-year-old son could take you.’ Howard never forgave me for that remark.” Shortly afterward, Mailer approached Weymouth and said, “Either he goes or I go.” Faced with a Hobson’s choice, she did nothing and Mailer got ready to leave. As he and Norris were walking out, Epstein said, “Norman, grow up.” Vidal stayed and “held court,” as one guest described it.
The following day both men gave postmortems. Mailer said that Vidal “was nothing but a mouth.” Vidal told a reporter, “I actually feel sorry for him. After all, it’s not easy being a failure like Norman.” Not long after the Weymouth party, Norris went alone to another dinner party as Mailer was in Utah. Someone rose and gave a toast to Mailer, after which record executive Ahmet Ertegun gave a toast to Vidal, who was also absent. As one of the dinner guests recalled, “Norris stood up and doused him with a whole glassful of wine right in his face. Ahmet’s wife was there and they both laughed. I was surprised, honestly, because if someone other than Norris had done it, they wouldn’t have stood for it.”
Mailer explained to Gordon Lish that even after he had excoriated Vidal in his Esquire essay on television, he was still angry when he ran into him at Weymouth’s. “Nothing mattered. I just had to trash him. I think I’d a taken a dive into cancer gulch that night if I hadn’t.” For her part, Norris wrote, she had been “horrified and helpless” watching the altercation. She and Mailer never could figure out why Vidal had compared Mailer to Charles Manson, she wrote, which was the root cause of the animosity. “We were never invited to Lally Weymouth’s again,” she said, adding that Weymouth said later that the party “probably had made her reputation as a hostess.” Vidal passed over the incident in his memoir, Palimpsest. When he included the essay that had started the feud, retitled “Feminism and Its Discontents,” in his 1993 collection, United States: Essays, 1952–1992, he dropped the comparison of Mailer to Manson.
AS 1977 ENDED, Mailer was ready, after eight months of research and several trips to Utah, to begin writing. He was still weighing titles and listed several in his early notes: “Let’s Do It” [Gilmore’s final words], “American Virtue,” and “Violence in America: A Novel in the Life of Gary Gilmore.” His titles all point to his search for Gilmore’s humanity, the praiseworthy but recessive character traits—the minority within—that offset his banality and violent crimes. Shortly after the book was published, Mailer said that Gilmore was “a kind of litmus test for compassion” because he was “on the one hand despicable and detestable and, on the other, he’s admirable. How are you going to swallow that?” He wanted the story to “force people to look at how narrow our concepts of human nature are.”
For the book that he would eventually title The Executioner’s Song, Mailer returned to methods used in The Naked and the Dead. Both are told by anonymous, omniscient narrators who wheel their perspective through a large cast of characters, range freely in time and space, and knit two major and several minor plot strands into a huge social tapestry. Given these similarities, it might seem that his decision to revert to this perspective, even after thirty years, was not unduly complicated. Yet it was. The materials for the story, covering the nine-month period from Gilmore’s release from prison to his execution, were in hand. But Mailer was at a loss as to how to approach the story, which seemed to consist of alternating layers of complexity and simplicity, and a chain of contingencies running back a hundred years, as revealed in the final sentence of the first chapter, in which Gilmore’s cousin Brenda reflects on Gary flying home to Utah from St. Louis, after being released from federal prison.
With all the excitement, Brenda was hardly taking into account that it was practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake.
Achieving this laconic, ungarnished style—Mailer described it as “a gentle voice that seems to come in from over the hill”—was no easy matter, and during his first month of writing, from mid-January to mid-February 1978, he was paralyzed, he said. His first attempt was to begin the narrative at one remove.
He created a character named Staunchman, “a middle-aged movie-writer whose marriage had broken up and he was living in Paris and he was miserable, just a big ungainly man with two huge suitcases, sort of a figure in the Latin Quarter and everybody would wonder, ‘What is this man with the two huge suitcases doing?’ ” His baggage is filled with all the interviews with Gilmore and company, and he was charged with writing a novel-length treatment for a famous director, someone like Francis Ford Coppola, who said to him, “Put everything in, don’t leave anything out; I want to know all about this man Gilmore before I make the movie.” But Mailer did not immediately see that placing Staunchman between the reader and the Gilmore story, using him as a sort of impresario of the voices of the characters, would be a problem. He was enamored of his “baroque” style, he recalled, and uneasy about making the switch to something simpler. It had been “so difficult,” he said, “for me to arrive at my own style—after all I’d been a public writer for 10 to 12 years before I felt I’d come into my own style as such [with Advertisements for Myself]—I didn’t start with an identity. I forged an identity.” Achieving this style was a matter of some pride because “it’s not easy to master. It’s not supple. It does not adapt to everything that comes up.” Indeed. For a 1,000-page
saga with approximately 300 characters, half of whom have speaking parts, the baroque style was a dull tool.
Finally, he decided to drop Staunchman and adopt “the shifting point of view used in the 19th-century when people believed in God and the novelist could play at being the All Knowing Supreme Deity.” He had to take the leap but he felt, as he said later, as if he’d “violated the fundamental integrity of the novel.” The modern novel, it should be said. Dickens and Balzac would not object. Whatever the offense to the ghosts of Conrad and James, he concluded that he had to “get myself knuckled down to the simple point of telling that story flatly, blankly, in the third person,” returning to the omniscient point of view last used in his first novel.
“The deity,” reviewer Ted Morgan notes, “orchestrates the voices, but does not join the song.” Gone are the hallmarks of Mailer’s rococo style, “the existential musings, the outrageous ideas, the over-characterizing.” In earlier years, Mailer said, he would have been unable to relegate himself to being “nothing but a transmission belt.” It was hard to silence the subjunctive selves who had voiced his anticipations, intimations, fears, and, occasionally, hopes, as Mailer made clear after the fact. He surprised himself by this departure, and astounded the literary world. Habituated to his refractive presence in the nonfiction narratives of the previous dozen years, almost every one of the numerous reviewers of The Executioner’s Song remarked on his conspicuous absence, one “so pronounced,” reviewer Richard Stern noted, “that it dominates the book like an empty chair at a family dinner.” He calls The Executioner’s Song “unremittingly unmailerian,” and “an act of literary suicide.” Stern was almost alone in this view, however. The overwhelming majority of the book’s reviewers agreed that Mailer’s decision to tell the story of Gilmore’s final months and execution in a quiet voice from the other side of the hill demonstrated “narrative technique of real genius.”
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