Mailer could have cut out most of the legal and media exertions detailed in Part Two, “Eastern Voices.” The first five hundred pages of the book cover the period from Gilmore’s release to the day that he insists that his sentence be carried out, November 1, 1976. “By that time,” we are told, “Gary Gilmore was a household name to half of America.” Even allowing extra space for the execution and autopsy, Mailer could have covered the final ten weeks of his life in two hundred pages, bringing in the book at a hefty but manageable seven hundred pages. But after his conversation with Schiller, he realized that Gilmore’s story could not be dissevered from the stories of those who helped assemble it—Schiller and his team. Schiller “might be the only one with a realistic notion of what could happen when you died in public,” as Schiller’s associate Barry Farrell observed.
“Eastern Voices” moves deftly among the huge cast: from Gilmore to those who seek to aid or impede his effort to die, to Nicole, friends and families, prisoners, and to various members of the media—Farrell, Tamera Smith, and national figures like Jimmy Breslin, Bill Moyers, David Susskind, and, at the end, Geraldo Rivera and Rupert Murdoch. At the center is Schiller, frantically seeking to record everything. Schiller “had to obtain this story,” Mailer wrote. “That was fundamental. He wanted this story from his spinal cord out.” He was Gilmore’s chief interviewer (they met five times in person), as well as his advisor, paymaster, salesman, media spokesman, witness to his execution, literary executor and distributor of his ashes. Over three hundred people have speaking parts in The Executioner’s Song, and Schiller had dealings with 99 percent of them.
Mailer’s abilities were put to the test by “Eastern Voices,” not only by the increased size of his cast (169 new characters are mentioned by name) but by the nature of their relations—supportive, manipulative, parasitical, obliquely and directly opposed—with each other and with Gilmore, Nicole, and Schiller. In “Eastern Voices” Mailer not only carries the story to its grim conclusion, he also doubles back, recounting Schiller’s efforts to collect the information. Approximately 125 of the final five hundred pages of the book consist of documentary material. Mailer wisely chose to include this material, without which Gilmore’s legal battles and love affair would be opaque.
But his decision to extend the ambit of his narrative and present a full portrait of Schiller was dictated not only by Schiller’s centrality, but also by Mailer’s desire to give the reader something that Capote purposely omits: the story of the story. The interviews with George Plimpton and others that Capote gave on both his personal involvement with the killers and his methods of research and reconstruction are at least half again as interesting as In Cold Blood itself and would have been a welcome addition to the book. He cannot be criticized for leaving out what the nineteenth century called “the love interest”—unlike Mailer, he had none—but any careful comparison of his book and Mailer’s should fault the lack of reference to Capote’s emotional and extended involvement with Hickock and, especially, Smith. Mailer recognized that half of his story was the sharp-elbowed maneuvers of the media to gain access to Gilmore and his legal struggle—which he won by losing his life—and that this vicious, tawdry, but equally fascinating part of the story could best be seen from the centrifugal vantage point occupied by ringmaster Schiller. As Gilmore’s chief observer, he provided Mailer not only with his observations of Gilmore, but with a privileged view of himself observing Gilmore. “Do you really want to have this story in the book?” Mailer asked Schiller, who replied, “Do what you want.” As he states in his afterword, “Schiller stood for his portrait, and drew maps to his faults,” exposing not only “the stuff of his visions but the logic of his base schemes.”
Schiller realized, he said later, that by giving enough unedited material to Mailer, “I will never fucking have to worry about somebody saying that I hired Norman Mailer to write this book and he whitewashed Larry Schiller and cleaned up all the things that he was being criticized for doing to get this story.” Mailer interviewed Schiller a number of times. “I held back very, very little,” Schiller said. “I knew I’d be helping the project.” Schiller’s self-scrutiny is roughly equivalent to Mailer’s sometimes comic, sometimes somber, generally unsparing self-portrait in The Armies of the Night. Schiller was critical to the success of the book in more ways than one and became Mailer’s most important collaborator until Mailer’s death. Real life does have plots, if you have the wit to see them.
The Executioner’s Song was published on October 15, and Mailer embarked on a publicity tour, traveling to Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Ann Arbor, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, not to mention several appearances in New York. He appeared on William Buckley’s Firing Line, and did a two-part interview with Dick Cavett on PBS. Executioner’s Song appeared in England on November 5, and Mailer flew over for three days of meetings with reporters, who seemed as interested in his divorce case as the book. He told one British reporter that he felt it was a mistake to have called his book a “true life novel,” and should have called it a “true crime novel.” In later years, Mailer said more than once that he wished he had eschewed a subtitle altogether.
James Atlas’s long profile of Mailer was the cover story in The New York Times Magazine a few weeks before Executioner’s Song was published. It was the longest biographical piece on him since Brock Brower’s 1965 profile in Life. The cover photo of Mailer in an open-necked blue work shirt was a good one. He had lost weight after finishing the book and looked trim. The camera angle was kind to his big ears. Mailer had to like this photograph, as well as the others accompanying the profile, one of which showed him standing with Norris, looking beautiful, and John Buffalo on the rocky, low-tide shore below the Thomas house in Maine. But he hated the profile, calling it, with some justice, “a defile.” Atlas is vinegary throughout. He sets the tone with his opening description of what he felt was Mailer’s boring reading at Harvard in the spring of 1979—there is no mention of any successful readings or talks at his alma mater or elsewhere—and continues with a catalogue of gaffes and blunders. Less attention is given to his achievements. Atlas gives a fairly brief description of Executioner’s Song—presumably the profile’s raison d’être—and makes only a few evaluative comments. He grants that Mailer “made eloquent the sprawling cast of inarticulate characters” in the story, but says it is flawed by “his addiction to the grandiose.” He dislikes the “Homeric” description of Larry Schiller, and says the book is “far too long.” Atlas returns relentlessly to the question—a fair one—of whether Mailer will make good on his early promise to write the great American novel. He is not hopeful and cites the “shrinkage of his literary reputation” and how he “cultivates a prurient reputation.” Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he says, Mailer is “garrulous, vain, paranoid, vengeful, incessantly self-reflective.” Two weeks after the profile appeared, Mailer responded to a reporter at New York magazine.
Atlas, he said, “merely pretended great friendship and sympathy during months of interviewing,” and then went on to write a “mean-spirited” piece. He was upset with Atlas’s suggestion that the only reason he had classified Executioner’s Song as a novel was “to compensate for his failure to produce the definitive work of fiction he used to boast of so tirelessly.” But what angered him most was the quote he included from William Styron, who said Mailer had become “a figure of pathos.” Atlas passed over their long-running feud, and Mailer cried foul. Many years later, when a friend showed him a copy of the profile, Mailer said that he believed that Atlas (whom Mailer now liked) might have been given editorial direction to rough him up. Norris was still angry about Atlas saying that Mailer bored the Harvard audience. She was there, she said, and it was “not true.” She recalled how she got back at him. At a party at the home of Jean Stein, not long after the profile appeared, Stein brought Atlas over to meet Norris, who was several inches taller than him. She looked right over his head and said, “Oh yes, where is he?”
MAILER OWED A boo
k to the British publisher of Marilyn, Hodder and Stoughton, and within a week of turning in the final draft of Executioner’s Song, he began work on Of Women and Their Elegance, which he later described as a “fantasy autobiography” of Marilyn Monroe. Having been preoccupied with matters of veracity and documentation for over two years, Mailer was ready to give his imagination a workout, and the short novel invents several improbable episodes—some quite salacious—in Monroe’s life during the period she was married to Arthur Miller. He would later transform the novel into a play, Strawhead, which was performed at Actors Studio. The book grew out of Mailer’s interaction with Milton Greene, who had taken photographs of Marilyn Monroe, as well as many other celebrities such as Gene Kelly, Marlene Dietrich, and Jimmy Durante. Mailer agreed to write a text on the photos but he didn’t want to interview models. “I wanted to write about Marilyn,” he said. The novella received few reviews, the majority negative, and was overshadowed by The Executioner’s Song, which was a paperback bestseller through the end of 1980.
When he was finished with the fifty-thousand-word Monroe book, he went off to Maine with Norris and the children. The summer of 1979 was their last at the Thomas house. While there he wrote to Susan and said he had “a nice feeling” being with all the kids, especially now that he was done writing. He had written so much, he said, that “I don’t even squeeze words out of my dick no more, they come out through my elbows, and I’m probably capable of writing with my nose.” He had to take some time off, he said, or “I was going to go squeak.” Susan was about to marry Marco Colodro, a Chilean economist, and he offered to have a party for her at the Brooklyn apartment. He relaxed, did a series of interviews with James Atlas for a New York Times profile, and caught up with his correspondence.
Abbott wrote to Mailer for help; he wanted to be paroled. Mailer asked Abbott what he should say, noting that the authorities would be unlikely to believe anything he might say about “your good character, sterling deportment” since it was obvious that they had never met. “I could, however, write glowingly about your literary possibilities. I did as much for [Eldridge] Cleaver years ago and it was one of the factors contributing to his release.” Abbott was still nearly two years from his release, and Mailer kept up a stream of encouraging letters.
With Executioner’s Song on its way to the printer, he felt relaxed enough to compose a faux obituary, which he published in Boston magazine. “Novelist Shelved” is a comic offshoot of the divorce follies in which he was engaged. “Norman Mailer passed away yesterday,” it begins, “after celebrating his fifteenth divorce and sixteenth wedding. ‘I just don’t feel the old vim,’ complained the writer recently.” The piece contained a number of brief tributes from notables: Capote (“He was always so butch”); Vidal (“He had the taste of a Snopes”); Gloria Steinem (“A pity. He was getting ready to see the light”); and Warhol (“I always thought Norman kept such a low profile”). President Jimmy Carter lauded him for advancing “American book-writing and reading,” and regretted that he and his wife “never did get to invite Norman Miller [sic] to the White House.” Family members were not quoted, but it was reported that around the deathbed were “eleven of his fifteen ex-wives, twenty-two of his twenty-four children, and five of his seven grandchildren, of whom four are older than six of their uncles and aunts.” The piece became a family favorite, and John Buffalo read it at the Carnegie Hall memorial for his father twenty-nine years later.
IN AN INTERVIEW with John Aldridge about Executioner’s Song, Mailer said that for years he had been interpreting the American scene, and felt that he had “used up my audience.” Now, he said, “I want another audience. I want those people who think I’m difficult to read.” So in the period between turning in the manuscript and publication day, he began to cast about for representatives of this new readership. Martha Thomases, who had helped type Executioner’s Song, introduced him to twenty-three-year-old Legs McNeil, one of the founders of Punk magazine, and perhaps the first to use the word “punk” to describe the mid-1970s hard-edged rock ’n’ roll. Punk also took swipes at the establishment, left and right. After Gilmore’s death, his final words, “Let’s do it,” appeared on punk musicians’ T-shirts. McNeil was associated with the major early punk group the Ramones, and was the manager of another, Shrapnel. He admired Mailer’s writing and considered himself to be “representative of the new audience Norman hoped to reach.”
According to McNeil, his outspoken manner had been compared to Mailer’s in a Village Voice story, and people were watching when they met in Martha Thomases’s kitchen. “I’m sure you’ve never read anything I’ve written, and I’ve never read anything you’ve written, so, just to set the record straight, we’re even.” Mailer laughed at this bluster. McNeil invited him to come to CBGB, a music club in the Village where Shrapnel was doing a benefit to buy bulletproof vests for the police. He was surprised when Mailer showed up a few nights later with “a scorching redhead,” Norris. It was smoky and loud, but Mailer seemed to enjoy the scene, and later he and Norris went to a party with McNeil at Joey Ramone’s loft. Thomases recalled Mailer saying that the musicians reminded him of young boxers. Mailer took McNeil aside for a talk, and told him that “he was the Godfather and I had to listen to him because I was just like him.” Two days later McNeil came to Brooklyn to interview Mailer.
When he showed up, Mailer challenged him to walk across the narrow catwalks twenty feet above the apartment floor. McNeil, who had a hangover, declined, saying, “I haven’t got anything to prove.” After a quick tour, they sat down for the interview, which was published in the marijuana magazine High Times. Mailer touched on many topics in the interview, including Hemingway and the Women’s Liberation Movement, at the time staples in all of his interviews, but made scant comment on drugs for an interview in a magazine devoted to the topic. He did say that he liked punk music more than he thought he would. Perhaps the most interesting comment is when McNeil asks him about cancer, which Mailer calls “schizophrenia of the cells.” He explains that when people are in a crux—he uses the example of being in a bad place while rock climbing—“I think we get driven very near this insanity of the mind or the flesh.” He repeated what he had said many times before: some people under great stress “opt for letting the mind go, other people opt for letting the body go.” He would present such a situation a few years later in Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
Shrapnel was invited to play at the engagement party for Susan and Marco Colodro at the Mailer apartment. She remembers a huge crowd, including Woody Allen and Kurt Vonnegut. The band set up in the loft above and played while the guests danced to tunes such as “I Lost My Baby at the Siegfried Line.” “Damn good song,” Vonnegut said to the guitarist, “lots of feeling.” Mailer got into a head-butting contest with Glen Buxton, another rocker, and later got into a wrestling match with McNeil. As the band was leaving, Mailer pressed bottles of Scotch on them. One of them said, “Norman, we don’t know how to drink Scotch yet.” Mailer replied, “Well, you’ll learn, you’ll learn.” Shrapnel played at the house a few more times, but Mailer soon drained what meanings he could from punk rock. McNeil would become a family friend, but there would be fewer such hijinks as the decade went forward.
THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG was reviewed as widely and as warmly as The Naked and the Dead and The Armies of the Night. With the exception of negative reviews by Diane Johnson in the NYRB and Germaine Greer in The Hollywood Reporter, all the major reviews were enthusiastic. The book reached number three on the New York Times bestseller list and spent longer—twenty-five weeks—on it than any of his other books, excepting Naked and the Dead. Mailer maintained the approval of his old admirers and gained the attention of a new audience. He was awarded his second Pulitzer for Executioner’s Song (which gave him “an emotional boost,” Norris recalled), and was a finalist for both the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has never gone out of print and is probably the Mailer book most often taught in college classes—En
glish, journalism, American studies, and criminology.
There was disagreement over the relative merits of the book’s halves. Partly because of Schiller’s recording of the final moments of criminals and celebrities, partly because of the media’s disinclination to read about its own avidity for the sensational, and partly because of the force of “Western Voices,” “Eastern Voices” was generally less admired. As a character, Schiller failed to impress everyone. One reviewer said, “When Mailer has Schiller thinking of Gilmore’s letters to Nicole, ‘must be tons of meat and potatoes in those envelopes,’ we know Mailer isn’t writing about Francis of Assisi.” But another reviewer, John Cheever, notes that Schiller “is offered a large sum of money for an exclusive account of the execution [$125,000 from one of Rupert Murdoch’s editors, who called him repeatedly], but he refuses money for the first time in his career and contributes a sense of decency and fitness to the narrative that is shared by the other principals.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt found the book’s finest achievement to be “a stunningly candid report on the complex, ambiguous and often-disturbing relationship that increasingly exists among the news, the newsmakers, and the reporters.”
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