There was some friction during the filming. O’Neal, who played Tim Madden, thought some of the dialogue “would come off as laughable,” Tom Luddy recalled, and Lawrence Tierney, a notoriously difficult actor, who played Dougy Madden, did things his own way, sometimes ignoring direction. As producer, Luddy said he thought the screenplay “had a lot of problems.” He wrote a memo listing eleven problems in the script, and Mailer agreed with most of them. But he had solutions only for a few, and ignored the rest. If he could relive the entire project, Luddy said, “I would get another writer to adapt the book and convince Norman to focus on directing it.” Mailer hoped to solve his plot problems in the editing process.
In a letter written to the still-jailed Richard Stratton shortly after the production was completed in mid-December, Mailer described the experience of directing.
I always felt as if I were in jail when I was writing a novel. A perfectly pleasant but subtly deadening spiritual jail. And directing the movie I found out why. Suddenly I could use my real talents: more superficial, perhaps than my developed talent as a writer, but with me all my life and dying to be honed: to wit, my practical side. Directing a movie, you contemplate 40 different categories of problem in a day, and you get an appetite for it. It becomes the best life you can have. I’ve been feeling logy for the last few years but on the film where we’re working 15 hours a day, 6 days a week, and I had more energy, or let’s say, as much energy as I’ve ever had.
Over and over in interviews, he compared writing and directing, in every instance grumbling about the former and exalting the latter. “Anything’s easier than writing,” and novel writing is the hardest, he said. It is “an excruciating activity; when I’m in the middle of one I often feel like a monk in the wrong monastery.” But directing, he said, made him feel like a general in “an ideal war” with no blood. “It is like a campaign: you eat outside standing up; everybody starts the day having breakfast together; it’s a communal exercise. You move to different places every day; the campaign moves here, moves there; it’s going to be over in forty-two days. It’s like hunting with a camera in Africa.”
When filming was done, Mailer wrote to his two imprisoned friends, and made plans to visit. He promised to visit Farbar in late January when he was in Pittsburgh to see Stephen in a play. After telling Stratton that he would definitely visit him in early spring, he went on to say that he had been relaxed during filming but was now feeling nervous because he owed Random House “a million dollars in advance royalties they’ve already paid me over the last three years for a book which is only half done.” His plan was to edit the film half the time and write half the time, and this is what he did, more or less, for all of 1987. At this point, he had high hopes for the film. John Bailey’s imaginative cinematography captured the bleakness of Cape Cod in the late fall, and the dailies that Mailer had seen were exceptional. He apologized to Mickey Knox for not finding a role for him in the film, but “if this picture hits, then I think I’ll command larger budgets.” Then Knox could be given roles. “At that time,” he said, “I won’t have to listen to you saying, ‘But, Norman, you know nothing about directing a movie.’ ” One commercial film, he said, means that you’re a director. “Indeed, I’m even a member of the Directors’ Guild. How’s that for news?” Mailer remained a member for the rest of his life but never got another chance to direct, to his great regret.
After enjoying Stephen’s performance in Pittsburgh with Norris and John, Mailer went on alone to Altoona, where Farbar was incarcerated. They spent an hour and a half together catching up, discussing what kind of work Farbar might do after his release. He knew his friend might have trouble decompressing when he got out and tried to buck him up. “I respect the psychological work you’ve done on yourself,” he said. But Farbar seemed more and more bitter.
IN THE SPRING of 1987 Mailer asked Carol Stevens to meet him for a few days in San Francisco, where he was doing postproduction sound work at Russian Hill Recording Studios. He recorded her doing the voice of one of the two witches who laugh and gibber at the end of Tough Guys, another attempt to give the film a haunted quality. He spent a month there in April, and had a romantic reunion with her for a few days while working on the soundtrack of the film. He also saw Lois Wilson. Cannon had given Mailer control over the final cut of the film, and he was trying to find a way to clarify the plot. As he began editing, the dimensions of the problem began to emerge. In the end, Mailer had no choice but to use voice-overs to explain the tangle of relationships and reveal who killed whom. His screenplay departed somewhat from the novel, but ultimately was too respectful of it.
He finished editing in time for the fortieth annual Cannes Film Festival in early May. He was asked to serve on the nine-member jury, headed by Yves Montand. Godard was there with King Lear, but he and Mailer don’t seem to have met. Because he was a jurist, Tough Guys was screened out of competition. Mailer watched twenty-four films in twelve days, and met with other jurors to compare notes and vote. Tough Guys was shown twice, once for the press and once for a general audience. The somewhat stilted dialogue, which sounded, as Roger Ebert put it, “as if everyone in the film had learned everything they knew from watching old crime movies,” went over well with the press for the most part, although it got a sprinkling of boos. Vincent Canby, who had liked Beyond the Law, praised Tough Guys, calling it “a wonderfully exaggerated film noir story.” Menahem Golan had several films in competition and threw a large dinner to honor Mailer. Tough Guys was screened after dinner and received a standing ovation.
Upon his return Mailer made some final changes to the film, then got to work on the novel, breaking away only to see rehearsals of Norris’s play at the Actors Studio in June. For some time, she had been a member of the Actors Studio, writing both plays and screenplays, and directing. Go See, her two-character, two-act play about an erotic dancer and an anthropology professor was staged there in May or June of 1987, with Norris and Rip Torn acting the roles. Mailer was enthusiastic about her abilities and wrote to Farbar with praise. “All my life, as you know, I’ve wanted to be a successful playwright and simply don’t have the knack for it,” he said. Watching her staged reading, he said to himself, “My God, she’s a better playwright than I am.” He was always impressed with the effortless way his wife moved from one pursuit to another—model, actress (she played a drug dealer for six months on the television soap opera All My Children), playwright, and novelist, all while running the household. The Mailers were also leading a busy social life now that most of the children were adults. “Norman and Norris,” she wrote, “became almost one word in the social columns.” They dined at Elaine’s, Nicola’s, and Indochine, but Mortimer’s, at Lexington Avenue and East 75th Street, where they met with Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger, Diane and Ivan Fisher, Dotson Rader, and other friends, was their favorite Manhattan restaurant in the late 1980s.
AFTER JULY IN Provincetown, he and Norris went to Maine, and the family climbed mile-high Mount Katahdin, which stands at the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. The most well-known and difficult path to the summit lies across the Knife Edge. Several people have died in falls from this path, which is a mile long, but in places only three feet wide. In the afternoon, when descending the north slope, one is left in deep shadow. Mailer made the climb—six hours each way—three or four times. Kate recalled one of these at her father’s memorial. When they reached the Knife Edge, she announced she was going back down the mountain. He answered by saying that crossing it would enable her to grow and change in unforeseen ways. “It will be good for your karma,” he said. She hollered back:
My karma, my karma? I don’t care about my karma. You might care about your karma. You’re fifty-five years old. You have lived! You’ve written thirty books, You’ve had six wives and soon to be nine children, I am sixteen years old and I have never even been kissed! I have never even had a boyfriend! I DON’T WANT TO DIE. I WANT TO HAVE SEX!
Mailer told her that she would have an eve
n better boyfriend if she crossed. “The man’s will and charm were no match for mine,” she said, and she made the transit. She felt better, but did not admit it. Looking back, she said that eventually she got “the best boyfriend who then became the best husband anyone could ever dream of, and I think sometimes it had something to do with Dad and the mountain, courage, and will.”
That summer he was writing ninety pages a month and feeling good enough about his progress to say that the novel was “about the CIA.” But his publisher was unhappy; he was a year past his due date. He had written a bestseller, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, in sixty-one days, and Random House hoped that he would repeat this every year or so.
The film premiered on September 16, 1987, at Loew’s Twin on Second Avenue and East 66th Street. It was a warm, lovely evening, and a big crowd mingled on the sidewalk before the doors were opened. The guest list shows that many of the Mailers’ friends attended—the Fishers, Pat Kennedy Lawford, Bob Lucid, Legs McNeil, Jeff Michelson, the Schlesingers, Gay and Nan Talese, Jimmy and Rosemary Breslin, Mashey Bernstein, Jason Epstein, and Paul Newman. Most of the family was there. Judith McNally, his assistant, and Myrtle Bennett, the nanny for the younger children, both of whom rarely went to Mailer social events, also came. Tom Luddy, John Bailey, and most of the crew came, as did several of the actors. Carol Holmes, Mailer’s former girlfriend, and Carole Mallory, his current one, were invited and showed up. Mailer had recommended Mallory for a small role in the film, but casting director Bonnie Timmermann and producer Tom Luddy turned her down. Luddy recalled that Mallory had visited the set in Provincetown and interviewed Mailer.
In an interview with Roger Ebert during filming, he explained that as he grew older he had changed his ways. “I stopped drinking for a year and a half,” he said, and “when I went back, I didn’t enjoy the hangovers so much, so now I drink in moderation, of all damn things.” He went on to say, “a man who says he is happily married is a fool, but I will take a chance and say that I am. I stopped getting into trouble years ago.” In fact, Mailer’s liaison with Mallory and other relationships continued. Despite some occasional suspicions, Norris was not to learn the extent of his infidelities until he had completed Harlot’s Ghost in 1991. He insisted that she was the love of his life and valued the way she had become a second mother to his oldest seven children. When he did finally explain the root cause of his infidelities, he said that they really intensified about the time he began work on Harlot’s Ghost, as Norris wrote in her memoir.
He said his double life started when he began researching that book, and I suppose it could even be true. The timing was about right. All the clandestine talking on pay phones, making secret plans, hiding and sneaking around, were perfect spy maneuvers. He said he needed to live that kind of double life to know what his characters were going through. (It was an imaginative excuse. I do give him credit for that.)
He said he had been totally true to me, except for one or two tiny one-night stands with old girlfriends when he was on lecture tours, for eight years after we got together, which might even be mostly true. It was his grand experiment in monogamy, and I had believed him. While it could hardly be said the experiment was a total success, it was the longest he had been true (more or less) to a woman in his life. His nature was to be a philanderer.
Mailer did attempt to be faithful to Norris during the early years of his marriage. If, in his confession to her, he smudged the facts about how many times he had fallen off the monogamy wagon, he was being entirely truthful about his motives for being unfaithful. He had two related reasons, one narcissistic, selfish, and sensual, the other bold, experiential, and to his mind completely necessary. His incessant affairs gave him purchase on the duplicity of intelligence agents and fed his narcissism. For Mailer, that it took a thief to catch a thief was an article of faith.
Before and after the premiere, he spent twenty days doing interviews for the film, and said it had received enough publicity “to float the Queen Mary.” But the reviews, with a few exceptions, were mixed, and the box office figures paltry (the film eventually broke even). After looking at all the early reviews, which were with few exceptions either mixed or negative, Luddy told Mailer that, overall, they were not going to help him. “It’s as if you opened a restaurant,” he said, “and got two reviews. One said, ‘This food is crazy, wild, and interesting,’ and the other one said, ‘Three people I know got food poisoning after our meal.’ ” The restaurant—the film—was doomed, Luddy said. Mailer reluctantly accepted this analysis.
He had told Susan that after the satisfaction he got from directing, the only way he would go back to writing “with any real happiness” was if there were no other way he could make a living. Cannon had hinted that he would give him another film to direct, but this was no longer in the cards, especially after the film was nominated for Golden Raspberry Awards in seven categories: worst picture, director, screenplay, actor and actress, supporting actress, and new star. Mailer tied for worst director with Elaine May, who had directed the monumental flop Ishtar. Conversely, the film was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award in four categories: best film, cinematography, female lead, and supporting male role. The fact that the film was nominated for best and worst film of the year by different groups confirmed Mailer’s belief that his works would continue to receive polar receptions. Tough Guys eventually became a minor cult classic, praised for its “amusing vagueness” about its fundamental genre: mystery thriller or black comedy, horror film or comedy of manners. Luddy summed up the film as “Tarantino before its time,” which he described as “long florid dialogue punctuated by grotesque violence.” Whatever the case, it was clear that Mailer’s film career was over. As he said in another letter, “Writing is the farm and movie-making is Paree.” He was going home.
AT THE END of 1986 Danielle married Michael Moschen, a professional juggler. Mailer invited them to live in Provincetown during their first year of marriage. For the greater part of 1987, Danielle painted in Norris’s studio, Moschen practiced his routines in the basement, and Mailer wrote in the attic studio. Norris was in New York with Matt and John and came up every other weekend. Danielle, her husband, and her father shared the chores, and enjoyed long quiet meals and discussions. “It was one of the best years I spent with my father,” she said. But after a time, Mailer yearned for the city. In January 1988, he wrote to Farbar to say he was getting tired of working in Provincetown and planned to move back to Brooklyn for a stretch. He was still following his usual country-city alternation, moving whenever one or the other became “a species of spiritual incarceration,” as he wrote Farbar about P-town. Mailer was paying some of his friend’s legal bills, and much of their correspondence was given over to Farbar’s various attempts to get his sentence commuted. These attempts failed, and Farbar became increasingly depressed. A year after his release he committed suicide.
His correspondence with Stratton was more literary. In Mailer’s letters and visits, he encouraged him to complete his novel, Smack Goddess. Mailer read drafts of it, made suggestions, and with Meredith’s help it was published in 1990. Mailer and Dick Goodwin gave it blurbs. Mailer was impressed with how Stratton had used his prison time to “look for some needed dimension” in his character. His comment on Stratton’s “moral grit” revealed something about his own ideas of moral growth.
That you’re physically strong is one thing; that can be a gift. But the other side of you you built out of yourself. But the other side of anyone, moral strength that is, is a construction. For if that were given by God, there’d be no logic to anything. We would all be dealt unequal hands, and that doesn’t feel right to accept. (Before we get too far in this, I don’t mean the real stark ends of the scale, morally speaking, but I believe we all have the same ability to improve or coarsen our spiritual nature.)
This letter, like almost all of Mailer’s letters since the late 1950s, was dictated, and he was sometimes slightly opaque. What he seems to be endorsing is the principle of spir
itual growth and/or decay, while holding out for the possibility that saints and monsters have been shaped, at least in part, by divine or demonic intervention. This idea would be further developed in his final novel, The Castle in the Forest.
In the eighty or ninety letters that he wrote in mid-January, his tone is valedictory. He admits that his commercial film career is over and that his experimental films are a footnote. In one letter he said he was pleased that Jonas Mekas, a leading light in experimental cinema, was showing Beyond the Law and Maidstone in Manhattan. He was satisfied to be considered “a distinguished minor artist” in cinema history. He reacquainted himself with Harlot’s Ghost and settled down for a long stretch of writing. “It’s like going back to a wife,” he told Stratton, and not particularly easy, “but oh, what fun when you begin to hold hands again.”
Harlot’s Ghost has great geopolitical sweep, looking back to World War II and forward to the Vietnam War, and is full of vivid portraits, divided between historical and fictional figures—he liked the idea of mixing them up in the same way E. L. Doctorow did in Ragtime. Of the former, the most notable are JFK and his brother Robert, their in-house nemesis J. Edgar Buddha (as everyone in the novel calls FBI Director Hoover), CIA director Allen Dulles, Uruguay station chief Howard Hunt (of later Watergate infamy), British double agent Kim Philby, Frank Sinatra, Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana, Fidel Castro, and William King “Bill” Harvey, Berlin base chief. Harvey is the most memorably drawn historical figure, matched only by the fictional Hugh Tremont Montague, a high CIA counterintelligence official, code name, Harlot. The narrator is Herrick “Harry” Hubbard, a young agent who goes into intelligence work in 1955 after graduation from Yale, following his father “Cal” Hubbard, an OSS officer in World War II. Cal’s best friend is Harlot, who is also Harry’s godfather and mentor. There are two major women characters: Harlot’s wife, Hadley Kittredge Gardiner Montague, who is part of the agency’s brain-trust, and Modene Murphy, a fictional stand-in for Judith Campbell Exner, the lover of JFK, Giancana, Sinatra, and young Hubbard.
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