Abbott took a bus back to New York, and a week or so later the Mailers drove in to attend a celebratory dinner at a Greenwich Village restaurant, hosted by Jason Epstein, editorial director at Random House. Attending the event beside the Mailers were Silvers, Erroll McDonald, and novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Abbott had corresponded with Kosinski starting in 1973 when he was president of the American chapter of PEN, and asked that he be invited to the dinner. They embraced passionately like long-lost friends. “Abbott was sort of bewildered by all this,” Silvers recalled. “He was like walking in a dream, and he didn’t know quite how to cope.” At the end of the dinner, Epstein offered a toast to Abbott’s literary success. On the telephone, Abbott told his sister, “These people really like me,” and after a pause, “That’s never happened to me before.”
Norris was worried about Abbott in the heat of the city, a place “where everyone was testy, a bad combination for someone as paranoid as Jack.” He called her on the phone in a state of agitation and said, “I’m going to blow, I’m going to blow.” She told him to stay cool; his book would be published on July 18, and good things were in store. When David Rothenberg, executive director of the Fortune Society, which helps released prisoners, saw Abbott and Mailer on Good Morning America, he immediately called Random House and urged them “to go slow with him on the interviews. He has to learn how to walk.” Rothenberg invited Abbott to come by for help, but Abbott turned him down. Richard Stratton, who had met a few criminals in his day, advised Mailer not to get involved with Abbott. Mailer answered, “You know, that’s one of the things I like about our friendship. We don’t have to agree.” Like everyone else, Mailer was also counting on good reviews and sales for Abbott’s book to level Abbott out. He and Abbott discussed the possibility of getting him a residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Norris later summed it up, “Boy, were we naïve.”
The early reviews of In the Belly of the Beast were enthusiastic. Abbie Hoffman, in a Soho News review, compared Abbott with two other writers who had taken on the prison systems of their countries, Russia’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Argentina’s Jacobo Timerman (Mailer had recently written a letter to New York officials supporting a lesser sentence on a drug charge for Hoffman, who had been on the lam for seven years). Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Terrence Des Pres also summoned up the Russian gulags, describing the maximum security prisons where Abbott had grown up as “an archipelago of the damned.” Des Pres, who had written an important work on the Holocaust death camps, described Abbott’s book as “the most fiercely visionary book of its kind in the American repertoire of prison literature. In the Belly of the Beast is awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible, and as an articulation of penal nightmare it is completely compelling.” Mailer spoke to Abbott on the telephone on July 17, a Friday, and told him that the Sunday review from Des Pres was going to make him a star. When Abbott went out to celebrate that night, he must have felt like Jay Gatsby when he first saw the green light on Daisy’s dock. But only a day before the Sunday Times containing the rave review appeared, Abbott got into a violent disagreement outside a twenty-four-hour restaurant, the Binibon, on the corner of Second Avenue and East 5th Street, just two blocks from the halfway house.
On the evening of July 17 Abbott went dancing at a German beer hall with two young women, Veronique de St. Andre from France, and Susan Roxas, a Barnard College student from the Philippines, whom he had met in an East Village bar. Roxas later testified that she had seen a knife sticking out of Abbott’s belt, and asked him about it. “This is a bad neighborhood,” he said. After the beer hall he took them for an early morning snack at the Binibon, walking in with one on each arm at around five A.M. He had eaten there before, although there is no evidence that he knew Richard Adan, the night manager and their waiter. A twenty-two-year-old Cuban-born actor and aspiring playwright, Adan was the son-in-law of the restaurant’s owner, Henry Howard, himself an actor. Abbott ordered some food, and while the women were looking over their menus they noticed that Abbott was having an argument with the waiter. Then he was gone.
It is not clear why Abbott and Adan then went outside, but they argued about the rest room. Apparently, Adan said that the bathroom was for staff use only, citing insurance concerns, and Abbott didn’t like the answer. It is possible that Abbott invited him outside to argue, or fight, or that Adan went out to try to calm him down, something he knew how to do, according to Bill Majeski, the New York detective who would soon become involved. Adan may also have been showing Abbott where he could relieve himself behind a dumpster located next to a wall mural honoring the slain John Lennon. An eyewitness at Abbott’s trial, Wayne Larsen, said Abbott lunged at a conciliatory Adan, who was backing away, “with terrific velocity because his hair [Abbott’s] sprung back from his head.” Abbott stabbed him in the chest with a knife with a four-inch blade. Larsen, a Marine veteran of Vietnam, said the blow “made a resounding impact,” and then, “for emphasis,” Larsen “thumped his chest with both hands, which shook visibly during his testimony.” Abbott then stepped back and screamed at Adan, who was trying to stanch a “canal of blood” flowing from his chest, “Motherfucker, do you still want to continue this?” Adan screamed back, “God, no. I already told you I don’t.” Then he walked a few steps along Second Avenue and fell, bouncing on the pavement “like a Ping-Pong ball.” He died within minutes. Roxas testified that Abbott came to the door of the restaurant and shouted to her and her friend, “Let’s get out of here! I just killed a man.” They went outside and Abbott said, “You don’t know me.” Then he ran.
“By the time I got there,” Majeski recalled,
there were about twenty people standing around. When I walked up to the scene the overnight detective squad was just arriving. I saw a kid lying in the street and he had this angelic look on his face. So many years later I can still see that look on his face. My first impression was, “This is not a bad guy.” Clearly he was a kid. There was a flow of blood that emanated from his chest because he was stabbed in the heart. Apparently, there was a lot of blood pumped out very quickly, and there was a stream running from the middle of the sidewalk down the curb and then into the street itself, a pool of blood in the street.
At six A.M. Abbott called Mailer in Provincetown. Mailer was groggy, and Abbott said he’d call back. Abbott returned to the halfway house, where a security guard saw him in the lobby. Next, he went to Erroll McDonald’s apartment, but McDonald didn’t answer—he had a feeling it was Abbott. At eleven, Abbott kept a brunch date at the Upper East Side apartment of Jean Malaquais. “He was extremely subdued and talked, as always, about literature and his projects,” Malaquais recalled. Abbott left at noon.
At Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown, he caught a bus and for the next nine weeks eluded capture. He went south, via Chicago and Texas, to Mexico and the Guatemala border, and then to the oil fields near New Orleans. Majeski said, “I had a lot of conversations with Richard Adan’s mother early on, and with his father-in-law. I kind of found myself promising the both of them, independent of each other; I promised them that I would get him. Once I made that commitment, to myself, then I couldn’t let it go.” He read In the Belly of the Beast and realized it was well written, but saw that Abbott “was not well-informed about life on the outside.” He concluded that eventually Abbott would ask for help from people he knew, as he had only $200 when he fled. Majeski spoke to Mailer briefly on the telephone the next day, but knew he needed to meet him in person. He called Judith McNally, Mailer’s secretary, who told him it was impossible for Mailer to come to New York. “You know how Judith could be—very standoffish. I said, ‘Unless you arrange a meeting with him I will show up and I will arrest him.’ She was saying, ‘You can’t do that, you just can’t do that.’ I wasn’t going to do it, but that’s how I got to him.” The first meeting did not go well, but Majeski was persistent and kept calling Mailer and others.
Anytime I got a new lead or a suspicion as
to where he was I would call them and say, “Listen I’ve got information that Jack was seen in Chicago and I understand that he was trying to get in touch with you.” They’d say, “Oh no, he’s not trying to get in touch with me.” But a couple days later I’d talk to that same person, “I heard he was reaching out to you.” And they say, “Ah . . . oh no, no he didn’t call.” So I knew he was. I believed that Norman was going to get contacted by Jack and he was. And later Norman did tell me he was contacted by Jack, but he didn’t tell him where he was. Norman was probably the least cooperative of all—maybe not least, but less than most, although there was mutual respect from the beginning. He was not a big help in telling me things verbally, but he still fell into that category of not telling me information. And that’s fine. If Norman knew Jack was in Texas, I could still pick that up from him just like I could from all the other people. Every conversation with the people I called ended with me saying, “Tell Jack Majeski’s right behind him.” And when I finally met Abbott in the courthouse corridor, he knew immediately who I was. “You’re Majeski,” he said.
One of the people Abbott was calling was Scott Meredith, his agent. Meredith had the phone records. “Abbott was calling him,” Majeski said, “to find out how his fucking book was selling.”
Ultimately, Majeski was able not only to tell Louisiana authorities where Abbott was working, but also the alias he was using: Jack Eastman—Abbott kept his first name because it was tattooed on the fingers of his left hand. On September 23, he was captured in the oil fields. He was charged with murder upon his return, and immediately retained Ivan Fisher, a New York criminal defense lawyer recommended by Mailer. Abbott was put in twenty-four-hour lockdown, solitary, because Fisher was afraid someone would kill him. Majeski and Fisher got to know each other at the ensuing trial, and they both became lifelong friends with Mailer. During the time Abbott was on the run, his book went through five printings, and the following year the paperback became a bestseller. He earned approximately $100,000 in royalties while he was in Louisiana loading and unloading trucks for $4 an hour.
ON JULY 16, two days before the events at the Binibon, Barbara Probst Solomon flew to Provincetown to do an interview with Mailer about Ancient Evenings, which Mailer was determined to finish that summer. She hoped to publish her interview in The New York Times Magazine. In recalling the visit, she explained her relationship with him, which went back to the spring of 1948 when she had met him in Paris. “I knew him from the time I was a young high school graduate and he was not yet THE Norman Mailer.” Her husband had died in 1967, and shortly after that, she continued, “at a time when Mailer had broken up with Beverly, Norman and I sought each other in a more intimate way. But that was temporary. I would characterize what we had over those many years as simply a profound friendship.” As they were talking in Mailer’s studio on Bradford Street Saturday the 18th, someone—a friend or perhaps one of the older children—came in and said that Jack Abbott had killed someone in New York.
It was the first time I ever saw Norman cry. He broke down, he cried, at that moment—cried for the dead student. This is not a side he often revealed. “This is the worst thing,” he said. By the worst thing he meant he felt in some way responsible for the murder. And then the Times said to me, “Well, put Abbott in your interview.” But my interview had been a literary interview. It actually was completed before we knew of the murder. So I said, “Abbott happened after. You’ll see when you look at it. This was a literary interview. We finished it.” The Times then said no. I called up Bob Silvers of the New York Review, and he said, “Oh, this is not the time for a literary interview with Mailer.” So it was published in the Boston Review and Pieces and Pontifications, and other places. When I told Mailer, he said, “Well, I’m in the outfield now.”
Writing to Professor Mike Lennon on July 29, Mailer said, “I’ve been in a state of shock from Black Friday, i.e., early Saturday A.M. I can still hardly believe Jack did it. Your relative V. I. Lenin once said ‘Whom?’ as a test to ask ‘who benefits?’ when you can’t figure something out. I reckon it was the devil.” Norris believed that their telephones in Provincetown and Brooklyn were tapped, but Majeski said this was not the case. During this period, Mailer had nothing to say to the press. In early August they went to Maine with the family. Danielle remembers that he was “extremely depressed.” Unable to reach Mailer, frustrated reporters pestered Scott Meredith for a statement. Mailer’s agent said that he had met Abbott “a few times after his release and he seemed a gentle, kind person.” As far as Mailer was concerned, Meredith said, he was “still unwilling to talk about it. I think that unwillingness will be permanent. He’s just heartsick.” His first public statement came when Abbott was caught: “Jack Abbott has had one of the toughest lives I’ve ever encountered, and the next stage is not going to be any easier.” From start to finish, Mailer did nothing to distance himself from Abbott.
Norris first met Ivan Fisher when she and Mailer went to his office to discuss the upcoming trial. Fisher, who stands about six foot five and speaks in a booming voice, said, “We’re going to have Jack back out on the streets before you know it. Don’t worry about a thing.” Norris was “flabbergasted,” and replied that Abbott “is going to do this again and again if he gets out,” and should be locked up permanently. “Norris was morally offended, deeply, that I actually wanted to win an acquittal for Abbott,” Fisher recalled. “This set us apart instantly.” Mailer, “the constant voyeur,” moved his chair back, so to speak, to watch the exchange. “He loved the notion,” Fisher said, “that there I was, you know, the complete counterpoint to the soul of the woman he loved most in the world.”
The trial began in mid-January 1982. Fisher mounted a strong defense, reading from Abbott’s book about prison-induced paranoia, and speaking emotionally about how Abbott’s worldview was the result of a twenty-five-year prison education. Pounding on a table and speaking in loud tones, he said, “He went from the belly of his mother to the belly of the beast.” The prosecution had a dozen witnesses who either saw Abbott stab Adan or placed him in the restaurant that morning. Abbott’s claim that Adan pulled a knife, which would have made his act self-defense, convinced no one. Naomi Zack, a philosophy professor who later married Abbott, said that long after he had been convicted Abbott still asked friends to search for Adan’s knife in the alley. It was “the holy grail” for him, she said. Needless to say, it was never found.
Mailer testified for twenty minutes on January 18, and described how he and Abbott had corresponded, and the letter he wrote in support of his parole. His testimony merited only a few lines in news reports. But after the proceedings were over that day, reporters surrounded him and he got into an impromptu discussion with them in the courthouse press room. It was a terrific mistake to take on thirty-five reporters, but he had no calculation in his bones. He admitted that he had missed Abbott’s capacity for violence, that he didn’t “pay enough attention to the little warnings he gave me in a quiet little voice about how that halfway house was really getting him ready to blow.” Asked what he felt about Adan’s death, he said, “Richard Adan’s death is an absolute tragedy. Who’s pretending that it isn’t? It’s a hideous waste, it’s a horror. The fact that Richard Adan is killed is something that the people who are closest to Abbott are going to have to live with for the rest of their lives. I mean, you can’t have my blood unless you go for it, but you can have my psychic blood, because naturally, I, like many other people are upset about the death of Richard Adan.” The mood shifted when Mailer said he was opposed to a lengthy sentence for Abbott. “Adan has already been destroyed,” he said, “at least let Abbott become a writer.” Further pressed, he said, “Putting people in prison and turning the key on them, and forgetting about them, that is the cellar, that’s the ground floor of fascism. A democracy involves taking risks.” This enraged the reporters. Paul Montgomery of The New York Times said that in his twenty-five years as a reporter, Mailer’s press conference “was the worst New
York press gang bang I’ve ever seen. Everybody went crazy at once, pushing forward.”
Norris said, “Norman was never cool under pressure, and tended to get angry and say stupid things when goaded, and the press are expert in goading.” If Abbott was freed again, Mailer was asked, wouldn’t he kill again? He replied, “I’m saying culture is worth a little risk, that’s what I’m saying over and over for 30 years.” Mike Pearl of the New York Post came back sharply: “Which elements are you willing to gamble with? Cubans? Waiters? What?” Mailer repeated himself: “Society has got to take certain risks,” adding that he felt “very responsible” for what had happened. Things got raucous at this point, and the volume went up; insults were traded. Mailer used the phrase “scumbag journalism,” and shortly after the news conference dissolved in acrimony.
The jury was divided between those who wanted to come in with a murder verdict and those who wanted manslaughter. After fifteen hours of deliberation, those favoring manslaughter won. At the courthouse, Adan’s father-in-law, Henry Howard, called the verdict “ridiculous”; Mailer called it “fair.” The sentence was fifteen years to life. Abbott, who had spent the previous five months in solitary reading The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer’s massive compilation of religious myths and practices—Mailer owned a twelve-volume set and had sent him a reprint—received the verdict with resignation. Mailer called Abbott after the verdict, and they talked about the problems state-raised convicts faced when they get out. Their conclusion was that such men “are both too strong and too weak to handle the world.” When told, after the verdict, that Henry Howard had said that his son-in-law’s blood was on his hands, Mailer said, “I think he’s right,” and walked away.
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