Shortly before it was published, a friend pointed out to him that the book’s length could be a record in American publishing, surpassing James Jones’s Some Came Running (1,266 pages). Mailer, a longtime communicant in the church of organic form, shrugged. The bound galleys of his novel came in at 1,334 pages. He said that Random House would add one line to every page to reduce the published volume to 1,310 pages. Longer and more detailed than any of Mailer’s other fictions, the novel’s several lines of action never really coalesce. The novel could be likened to a magnificent, half-finished cathedral, to borrow a metaphor he used to suggest the dimensions of his personality in The Armies of the Night. “Plot is the enemy of the great novel,” he said. “I’m interested in plots that do not have a resolution. Life is like that.” Harlot’s Ghost ends with these words: “TO BE CONTINUED”—a promise he would break. His greatest regret, he said the year before he died, was “the memory of the books I promised to write and didn’t.” Even as it stands, unfinished and abandoned, it may be his finest novelistic achievement, one of the last high peaks of his writing life, and the summa of his knowledge of postwar America, as seen through the eyes of two generations of CIA agents.
ANCIENT EVENINGS TOOK eleven years to complete, but Mailer left it for years at a time and wrote a half dozen other books in the interstices of its composition. Measured by clock hours, Harlot’s Ghost took longer to write than any of his other works. He departed from it only twice, once, briefly, to direct Strawhead and a second, longer, period to write a screenplay based on Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and then direct the film. He was prepared to postpone the novel if either of these projects was successful. But the play never got beyond short runs at Actors Studio, and the film, while not without its virtues, did not lead to a career change. There was a short-lived third project, a film version of King Lear based on Mailer’s “Don Learo” screenplay, directed by the great director Jean-Luc Godard. Mailer said that “writing a screenplay for Godard is like putting a message in a bottle and sending it out to sea,” but he completed it and sent it on for consideration. He was supposed to play Lear and his daughter Kate was to play Cordelia. Godard, however, wasn’t the least interested in Mailer’s screenplay, or Shakespeare’s play, and appears in the film as a nutty professor. Godard wanted Mailer to play Mailer and utter lines such as: “Ah! At last I am done. What joy!” After only one day on the set, he and Kate left Switzerland where the film was being shot, and flew home. The experience was “a true horror tale,” Mailer said. King Lear, called “a late Godardian practical joke” by critic Vincent Canby, was released in 1987 by Cannon Films. It baffled its small audiences.
In January 1986, several months before going to Switzerland with her father, Kate played Marilyn Monroe in Strawhead at Actors Studio, and got excellent reviews. Working with her father “brought me closer to him,” she said, adding that she was not particularly awed working with him. “You’re doing the work,” she said. “It’s a play.” Bert Stern, the fashion photographer who photographed Marilyn for his book The Last Sitting six weeks before her death, took pictures of Kate for an April 1986 Vanity Fair article on the play. “No one has played Marilyn better, except Marilyn,” Stern said, adding that he had seen many people imitate Monroe, “but only Kate has caught her vulnerability and sensitivity.” Mailer told a friend, half seriously, that he sometimes wondered if Monroe had been reincarnated in Kate. James Atlas described Kate’s performance in the Vanity Fair story, performing before “a select audience” that included Dustin Hoffman, Tina Brown, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Elia Kazan. “Young Kate Mailer,” he wrote, “amazingly became Monroe. She whimpered and flirted, was seductive and coy; she babbled to herself in a nervous, breathy, voice; she emanated sex.”
Kate was “incredible” in the production, Mailer told Malaquais, and added,
Perhaps in a year we will actually do the play Off-Broadway. I tell you, Jean, I was startled with her talent. She created a Marilyn who was lovely and vulnerable and sensitive and totally fucked-up, but restrained with instinctive taste to protect herself from her own ignorance. It was a lovely creation. People who know Marilyn came back to me afterward shaking their heads, telling me it was spooky, no one in the family can believe it.
Remembering the excitement surrounding The Deer Park’s four-month run in 1967, Mailer looked forward to returning to off-Broadway. But when the time came, Kate declined. Norris recalled the situation: “It was just a little complicated because of her dad directing her, and she didn’t want anyone to know for a long time that she was his daughter, and [initially] called herself Kate Cailean, which is her middle name. And people didn’t know for a long time that this actress was Norman’s daughter. But, it was problematic for her. It’s too complicated for me to talk about, but she just didn’t want to make her career as being Marilyn Monroe, with her dad.” Kate continued to act, and after Strawhead had roles in several plays, including Peter Brook’s production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and the film A Matter of Degrees.
With the exception of Susan, a practicing psychoanalyst and faculty member of the Chilean Institute for Psychoanalysis, all of the Mailer siblings went into the arts.
Mailer was not the easiest of fathers. He lectured his children vociferously, harangued them with the line “the good is the enemy of the great,” and fought with them. He and Stephen had several memorable clashes, some in public, but they always reconciled. Mailer was stalwart, however, in encouraging them in their careers. In addition to directing Kate in Strawhead, he worked with and advised Michael on several film projects, read and praised Betsy’s novel in progress, debated with Susan about psychoanalysis, and took pride in the elaborate, life-size horror figures that Matthew constructed, as well as his screenplay for “The Greatest Thing in the World.” Stephen, whom Mailer praised for his “physical agility on stage and his sensitivity to character,” said that his father “was very supportive because he is an artist.” Maggie compared the houses where they summered in Maine and Provincetown to an artists colony. “I think we were lucky,” she said.
I felt encouraged and I think if Dad had not been always trying to impart the importance of being an artist, perhaps we would have rebelled and become bankers. But I always felt that he was interested in what I was doing, and sometimes too interested. I mean, his standards were so much higher than anything I could conceive of. You know, when I was a teenager, it was laughable. He once said something like “Once you’ve become recognized as a leader in your community and in your college, then you’ll understand what I’m talking about.” He just took it for granted that that would happen. So I think he expected all the kids to be artists. I remember at one point saying I didn’t think I was up for that life, and he said, “Look, you have to do whatever you want, you know, and my love for you is there regardless.”
He hung the paintings of his two artist daughters, Danielle and Maggie, on the walls of his two homes, and was pleased and proud when they had a joint show with Norris at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown in 2007. Danielle, who describes her work as being “part autobiographical, part mythological and spiritual,” painted a subtle self-portrait titled The Good Daughter. She is asleep in a chair holding a copy of Ancient Evenings, recognizable by the color drawing on the back jacket of an Egyptian head. She finished the painting, a tribute from one artist to another, the day before her father died.
He was aware of the pitfalls surrounding parental advice. He and Mickey Knox discussed the matter several times in their correspondence. In 1992, Mailer wrote:
I agree with you: forget about giving advice to your children. It can’t be done unless you have a special relation to them, and unless they have a true need for your knowledge from their own point of view. Otherwise, it’s just a power trip to them and they are trying to establish their own power center, and won’t accept anything from a parent. . . . So who the fuck am I to steer someone else’s life? I would say just assume they’ll mellow out toward you as they get older. In the
meantime, give them a little of the green and stop complaining. What else do we have to spend it on, after all?
Mailer was financially generous with his children, as he was with his friends. He made many loans and gifts, and few people who dined out with him ever beat him to the check.
THE DEAL THAT called for Mailer to write “Don Learo” grew out of a luncheon meeting between Godard and Israeli film producer Menahem Golan at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1985. Golan, who ran Cannon Films with his cousin Yoram Globus, offered Godard $1 million for a film based on King Lear. They signed the deal on a napkin, which Golan framed and hung in his office. Working with Godard was a departure for Cannon, which heretofore had mainly churned out low-budget, high-violence films. During its peak year, 1986, Cannon made forty-three films. But Golan and Globus also aspired to produce high art films, which helps explain the deal with Godard. Tom Luddy, a producer at American Zoetrope Films, which for over thirty years has made films of the caliber of The Godfather: Part II, Mishima, and the restored version of Abel Gance’s 1927 classic, Napoleon, had close ties with Godard. Golan wanted “a normal American movie,” Luddy recalled, and therefore put in writing that Godard must use a screenplay approved by Cannon Films. Mailer’s name was suggested by Godard as the screenwriter and added to the napkin contract as “pre-approved” to write it. Golan tracked Luddy down at the festival, and asked him to enlist Mailer.
Mailer said no. “I knew I would have 30,000 Shakespeareans out to slaughter me,” he said. But Luddy knew that Mailer wanted to see Tough Guys Don’t Dance made into a film, and hoped to direct it. At a September 1985 meeting at a Midtown New York restaurant, Luddy sold him on the idea of a two-picture deal. “Tell Golan,” Mailer said, “that if he’ll do Tough Guys, I’ll do Lear.” Luddy called Golan in Los Angeles and put him on with Mailer. “Mr. Mailer, I’m happy to agree with you on a two-picture contract,” Golan said. Luddy agreed to be the film’s executive producer. Four months after the PEN congress ended, Mailer began working on both screenplays. Tough Guys had taken him two months to write; the screenplay went through five drafts and took six months. Work on Harlot’s Ghost all but ceased.
The biggest hurdle that he faced with the Tough Guys screenplay was that much of the novel takes place in Madden’s head. A second problem was that the plot depended on actions and situations that took place months and years, even decades earlier. Somehow, this backstory had to be presented, or adroitly deleted. He eliminated some minor characters, enlarged the roles of others, wrote several flashback scenes, and flashbacks within flashbacks—one of them showed Madden in prison talking to his cell mate, played by Mailer’s Provincetown friend Eddie Bonetti. He also planned to intimate Madden’s half-crazy, tremulous state by using music and “subtly sinister” images of Outer Cape Cod in late fall. The sum of all these changes streamlined the story somewhat, but problems remained. He wrote most of it in Provincetown, living alone until the summer, when Matt and John were out of school and joined him there with their mother. Mailer wrote to Bruce Dexter in late April about the translation process. Being a screenwriter, he told Dexter,
for a particular novel is, if it is not your own work, very much like being a first year medical student, and doing a long, detailed autopsy where you get to know the inside of the body you’re studying conceivably better than God, who might have less time. I did a screenplay once of The Rosy Crucifixion and it’s possible that I ended up knowing in a few small ways more of the work than Henry Miller. In working with Tough Guys, I can see the book on the table, all its virtues, all the places where it is not so virtuous, and it is the oddest book. The people, reduced to the tight net of a screenplay, are by the measure of anyone looking for a little cheer about human nature, a negative lot. All the while I was writing the book I was in love with them for their charms—monsters with charm have always appealed to me—and something of that, I hope, is still in the screenplay.
IN A LETTER to Abbott, Mailer said he would like to send him the “Don Learo” screenplay to get his reaction to the Mafia characters, “where you think it’s real, where you think it’s phony.” Abbott had written a new book, My Return, in collaboration with Naomi Zack, the young woman who had taken up his cause. Zack, who had earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia, was convinced at the time that Abbott “was unfairly convicted by an outraged public opinion inflamed by sensational treatment in the media.” My Return consists of a play, “The Death Tragedy,” depicting the murder of Adan with diagrams of the killing knife thrust, several appendices on the trial and the legal issues, and philosophical-polemical letters to Mailer, Styron, Silvers, Jerzy Kosinski, Mailer’s friend Mashey Bernstein, and several others. Abbott maintains his innocence throughout, and uses as an epigraph the last words of Melville’s Billy Budd before he is hanged—“God bless Cap’n Vere”—the implication being that Abbott stabbed Adan just as Budd had killed Claggart, out of instinct not malice, which may have been true.
Zack, who had begun a documentary film on Abbott, moved in 1985 to Plattsburgh, New York, near the correctional facility where Abbott was confined. For a nine-month period in 1985–86 she visited him every day. Zack was “bringing him books, conveying his messages, typing his writing. Of her relationship, she said: ‘All I can say is my main purpose is Jack needs and wants a new trial. As for his intellectual work, I take it very seriously.’ ” (She and Abbott would marry in 1990, while he was still in prison.) At the time, Abbott was trying, he said, “to behave like a ‘real’ intellectual.” Zack wrote to Mailer asking if he would write an afterword to their book. Mailer replied to Abbott: “You are so associated with me and people are so pissed off at me now after the P.E.N. Congress that it would result in your being taken less seriously.” He offered to write a blurb for My Return—“if I like it.” Abbott was convinced that a cabal was persecuting him, and Mailer was tired of his paranoia. “There are not legions lying awake every night trying to figure out how to thwart you,” he told him. Ultimately, he declined to write the afterword, or give a blurb, and their correspondence ended.
Zack and Abbott would divorce after two years of marriage. “I am lucky to have survived it,” she said. “I began to see that there was something wrong with all these women visiting prisoners.” Even after she broke off contact with Abbott, she continued to send him $50 to $100 a month until his death. “Jack had no remorse,” she said, adding that he “was proud of having been told by Mailer about [the birth of] his son, John Buffalo. I also think that he was well aware of the value of the world Mailer had taken him into, however briefly. Without Mailer, Jack would not have been a literary figure.”
MAILER CONTINUED TO work on the novel, but with no real energy. He finished “Havana,” a screenplay for Martin Starger at Universal Studios, and “Don Learo” before he and Kate went to Switzerland in August, and the final draft of Tough Guys shortly before filming began in Provincetown on October 27. In between, there were consultations about the cast and locations for the film with Tom Luddy, cinematographer John Bailey, and casting director Bonnie Timmermann. Even the 350th anniversary of the founding of Harvard in September didn’t pull him away. He was asked to be “an official representative” at the commemorative celebration, but does not seem to have responded to the formal invitation, even after he was depicted with fifteen other outstanding “Sons of Harvard” in a painting on the cover of the July 20 New York Times Magazine. The sixteen men, grouped as if for a photo on the lawn of Harvard Yard, included five U.S. presidents—John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and JFK. Mailer, in his pinstripe suit and loosened red tie, is pictured with Leonard Bernstein on either side of a seated T. S. Eliot, the two Jews crouching on either side of the ultimate WASP, as if ready to go into the game.
There were sixty-five locales used in the film, most of them in Provincetown but several in Truro and other nearby towns. Some of Mailer’s favorite places—the Old Colony, Pepe’s, the Red Inn, and Front Street restaurant—were filmed, and the Mailers’ home at
627 Commercial became the novel’s waterfront house. It was given a complete makeover to demonstrate Patty Lareine’s gaudy idea of wealth and the decor remained for more than a decade until Norris redecorated.
Before filming began, there was a casting call at one of the local art galleries. Some extras came from Boston, and some from Provincetown, including Chris Busa, the publisher of Provincetown Arts magazine, several local artists and two retired firemen in their 80s. “I wanted to use townspeople for extras,” Mailer said, “because the making of the movie had much more to do with Provincetown than the final results will.” Seeing the actors in the local A & P, or walking along the town’s narrow lanes, was the topic of conversation in the town. Ryan O’Neal was accessible, but Isabella Rossellini kept to herself, eating her meals in her trailer. Mailer admired her acting in David Lynch’s dark mystery Blue Velvet and sought the same mood for his film. Angelo Badalamenti, who scored the music for Lynch’s film, was hired for Mailer’s.
Mailer worked with sound designer Leslie Shatz to capture the sound of a punch to the face, as Shatz recalled at a twenty-year reunion of the cast and crew. According to Mailer, “the sounds of punches in movies are all phony.” So he began hitting himself “at least twenty times in the face and the chest until we got it right.” Shatz recorded the sound and used it in many movies afterward. “I always tell the other directors, ‘You hear that? That’s Norman Mailer punching himself. He’s in your movie.’ ” Mailer’s professionalism was something that Menahem Golan had taken for granted, but before the start of filming he did some checking and got a different picture of his director. Luddy recalled getting a five A.M. call from the Israeli, who said, “Tom, my knife is at your throat. Tom, you’ve given me Norman Mailer as a director. I’ve been talking to people in Hollywood, and they tell me he’s crazy.” But he proved himself to be completely disciplined, and was “adored” by the cast and crew. Working with a $5 million budget and a crew of ninety-seven, he brought the film in under budget and ahead of schedule.
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