Mailer also continued to meet with a group of writers who called themselves, with false bluster, the Dynamite Club. It came into being in 1989 as a forum for the examination of various conspiracy speculations about the assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, and other mysteries. The group met in Washington and New York, often at Mailer’s apartment. It included Jim Hougan, a writer and magazine editor; Dick Russell, a freelance investigative writer; and Edward Jay Epstein, author of a shelf full of books about the JFK assassination, Oswald, and the CIA. DeLillo also attended a few meetings, and recalls learning at one of them that Mailer had met and head-butted one of the Watergate burglars, although he could not recall which one. Finally, he wrote a short preface to The JFK Assassination: The Facts and the Theories, written by Carl Oglesby, one of the founders of a group called the Assassination Information Bureau. Mailer lauded the book for clarifying his thinking and praised Oglesby’s efforts to keep the mysteries surrounding the assassination before the public eye and on the agenda of Congress.
THE CRISIS IN the Mailers’ marriage, long simmering, came to a boil in August of 1991. His appetite for “a merry life and a married one,” as he once described it, had become too blatant to ignore. Norris had been suspicious for some time, but whenever she asked questions about his hastily scheduled, unaccompanied trips, he got angry, and when he did try to explain, his excuses were flimsy. But now she had evidence: long-distance phone call bills and motel and restaurant credit card charges. “It all made sense now,” Norris said. “I had been a complete and total fool. For years.” One afternoon in Provincetown, she confronted him in front of his sister, as Barbara recalled.
I remember I was sitting with Norman in the bar and Norris came down in a fury. She presented him with some stuff she found, I think, on the computer or something. I don’t know where she found it because he’d been denying it. And then she left. I remember looking at him and asking him, “Why did you do it?” And he said, “Life was getting too safe.”
Later, Mailer admitted to Norris that he had spent a night in Chicago with “an old girlfriend,” Eileen Fredrickson, but swore it was the only time and promised it would never happen again. Norris was devastated and incredulous, especially when he kept changing the details of his account. For the next two weeks she peppered him with accusations, getting so angry that “I physically attacked him a time or two, hitting him with my fists like a child, him promising again and again that it was a one-time thing that was over.” In late August, she returned to New York with John, thirteen, and Matt, nineteen, who was beginning college at NYU. Mailer stayed behind to do some writing.
Before she left, he gave her the keys to his studio and asked if she would drop off a small box of books there. She found this odd, because she had ventured up the three flights of stairs to the studio only once before. He called it his querencia, his lair or retreat. When she entered, she saw that it had never been swept and trash was piled in corners. Mailer had a high tolerance for mess. She went to his desk and found a collection of love letters. He had always said that women pursued him for his celebrity and that’s why he received cards and letters with endearments and lipstick on them. This was certainly true. As anyone who spent much time with him in public can testify, women never stopped buzzing around him, even when he was over eighty. He had told Norris that she was the love of his life, which was also true, but that was hard for her to believe after digging through a desk crammed with billets-doux, photographs, and mementos. It seemed to her that he wanted his secrets to be found. “This other life,” Norris wrote, “as he said over and over, willing me to understand, had nothing to do with me. Except, of course, it did.” She went home and wrote him a long letter.
In it, she told what she had found, including a signed note from Carole Mallory, dated December 1, 1989, in which she promised not to ask Mailer for any money for three months. Then, Norris got to the nub: “Are you in a dilemma as to whether or not you will risk our marriage to feed the beast?”
After more than sixteen years I feel like I’m living with a stranger. Incredibly, insanely, the sex has been better with you these last two weeks than it has ever been, and I’m remembering the early years. You are all consuming to me now. I only want, more than anything, to go on with you in the life we have. I want us to continue to love our children and have the home life we perhaps have taken for granted all these years. But if you are truly dissatisfied—even a small part of you—and you really need other women in your life to make you complete, then I won’t stay with you. I don’t want to end up a bitter wife, searching phone bills and Visa receipts for clues of infidelity, dying inside when you take a trip; not believing you when you say in that flat voice, “I love you.” I deserve better than that.
Mailer returned to Brooklyn the day he received the letter in the mail.
Norris had a small studio on nearby Hicks Street, and they walked there to have it out. “I’m going to tell you everything,” he said, “but there will be no divorce. I don’t want this to break us up. You are my life, and I won’t let you leave me.” Norris said she was making no promises. He opened up, detailing affairs, naming women, on and on, “like he was vomiting up a bad meal, and had to get it all out.” Norris listened, wept, and then attacked him, hitting and scratching. He buttoned up, deflecting what blows he could and absorbing the rest, using an old club fighter’s defensive skills. When he had told everything, Norris wrote, “We went back to the apartment, where we went to bed, totally exhausted, fell into each other’s arms, and had wild sex. Go figure.”
Norris confided in her close friends, and Susan, Danielle, Betsy, and Kate. Danielle recalls talking with her on the telephone.
I was concerned that she was sharing all this with me, and I felt divided. On the one hand, I was angry with my father, and felt empathy for Norris, but I also felt loyal to my dad, and didn’t want to get caught in the middle. So, I was very careful about what I said. I listened and was sympathetic, but I didn’t want to be disloyal to my father. Another part of me was weary: here we go again, dad is changing partners. My intuition was that Norris would not leave him.
The confessions continued, as he recalled brief affairs and one-night stands from years before, spitting out memories whenever they came to him—once in the back of a taxi. Norris told the driver to pull over and got out, and he chased after her. In front of others, they smiled and pretended, and somehow continued with work, family events, and black-tie social affairs. When they were alone, she said, their conversations were blunt, scathing, and brutal. When Harlot’s Ghost was published, there were several book events in New York. At the Random House party at the “21” Club (scene of Cal and Harry Hubbard’s memorable lunch in the novel), hosted by publisher Harry Evans on October 31, Carole Mallory showed up. She was “shockingly brazen,” Norris said, and kept bringing photographers over to take her picture with Mailer. She seemed to be taunting Norris, or seeking to create a scene or a physical altercation. Norris ignored her, and then told her quietly that she might as well enjoy herself because “she had gotten the last nickel she was going to get out of Norman.”
Norris was correct: Mallory lost her sugar daddy. In fact, Mailer had already broken with her. Their last tryst took place in June 1991 at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. In mid-September, shortly after his confession in Norris’s studio, Mailer called Mallory and told her he was severing relations. She threatened to go to the media with the story of their eight-year affair. According to Mallory, Mailer said that if she went public, her pain would be far worse than his. When she brought up his conscience, he said, “My conscience is my business. And so is my marriage. I love Norris.” After a few recriminations, the call was over and except for the book party at the “21” Club and one chance meeting a few years later, they never saw each other again. In her 2009 memoir Mallory said she finally realized that Mailer needed Norris “to feel whole.”
Lois Wilson had a far different relationship with Mailer, and a longer one. They first met at a S
tanford University party in 1949. She was an unusual woman, as her daughter and only child, Erin Cressida Wilson, explained. Growing up very poor in Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio, she was “desperate to get out.” At nineteen, she already had her master’s degree, and received her Ph.D. from Stanford only a few years later. Married at twenty-four to another English professor, Graham Wilson, she had a long, happy, and complex marriage. He died in 2005 at the age of eighty-nine. Their relationship, according to their daughter, “was deep and mysterious.” Recalling her mother, she said:
Lois had many lovers. Norman was her first, and the relationship lasted the longest. The rest of the men largely and eventually became good friends. One of them was Alberto Moravia [Mailer introduced them] who fell madly in love with Lois and begged her to come live with him in Rome. She did come to him on a Fulbright at the University of Rome (without leaving the relationship with Graham), but was never willing to leave Graham—or her life as a professor at San Francisco State—for Alberto. She desired freedom, even from her lovers.
The relationship with Norman was almost the same length as the marriage—Graham and Norman died around the same time. Thus, the marriage with Graham and the relationship with Norman were both sixty years. There were many instances in which Norman socialized with Lois and Graham at the same time. Norman and Lois were sexually compatible—yes—but they were also good friends who didn’t ask one another to hand over money, power, prestige, or family in return. They had somewhat of a pure relationship—one of fun, sex, secrecy, and endless talks into the night, lying next to one another. Lois was married to one man the entire time, and only had one child. Norman had many wives and many children during this time. They both knew that they had mates and other lovers, and there doesn’t seem to have ever been an ounce of jealousy or possession.
Lois Wilson and Mailer met in hotel rooms two or three times a year for an intense day or two, not unlike the way the two lovers meet in Bernard Slade’s play Same Time, Next Year. But while their meetings continued after he met Norris, their sexual intimacy ceased. Lois Wilson recalled:
Everything changed when he met Norris. I could see that she was a good person for him. And that he loved her and that she loved him. And I thought I’d better lay off. She has a right to her own modus operandi. So, I would hear quite a bit about her because he liked to talk about her; he truly was very much taken with her and she made a life for him that he couldn’t have made otherwise.
Wilson believes that she and Norris would have liked each other if they had met. But Mailer never brought them together, fearing Norris’s jealousy. “Yes, she was jealous,” Wilson said. “But she had no reason to be with me after a certain point. I was on her side.”
Eileen Fredrickson’s relationship with Mailer began thirty years after Wilson’s, but it was similar. An avid reader who spoke fluent Japanese, acted in commercials, films, and television programs, she had a number of careers, including modeling, bartending, and hosting her own radio news program. Like Wilson, she sought nothing from Mailer except his presence, and saw him only when he was in Chicago. He called her weekly for many years, and sent her inscribed copies of his books. In early October 1991, just before he went on the book tour for Harlot’s Ghost, he called to tell her that Norris had found her letters. Fredrickson recalled the conversation.
Judith got suspicious about the bills from Chicago, and she told Norris that there was something going on. Norris, at that time, knew about Carole Mallory, and she put her foot down and said she was going to divorce him if he didn’t vow, on his children, not to see me anymore. So he called me and told me that Norris had found out. He asked me to sit down, and then told me he had to take a vow on his children not to see me again. So from about 1991 or ’92 he wasn’t supposed to see me, but he called me all the time, and he did come to see me a couple of times.
Asked why he was involved with so many women, she said, “He just couldn’t help himself. He should have been a Mormon.”
Norris had stopped going on book tours with Mailer in the mid-1980s. She was tired of being ignored and disrespected by pushy fans and photographers. But she went along with him on the tour for Harlot’s Ghost, traveling with him to Boston, Chicago, the West Coast, and Washington, D.C. He wanted her to accompany him, insisted on it, she said. Her chief motive was to keep an eye on him. His was to reassure her that he was a changed man, as several of his comments indicate. For example, when asked if there was anything he wanted to do that he hadn’t, he said: “I’m too happily married to answer that.” Reporters referred to him as “a mellower Mailer” and “a softer Mailer,” and noted his “attestedly happy 11 years of marriage to Norris Church.” With Norris sitting next to him in an ABC studio where he was waiting to be interviewed, he said he was “a more content man” than in the past. “I think you have to round out or round off after a certain age or you’ll go crazy. You have to give up certain ideas of yourself. I gave up some of my crazier ambitions.” He said he had followed “his inner voice” all his life, “sometimes as a clown or a fool.”
His longest interview during the book tour was with David Frost. Frost led off by asking Mailer about the comic obituary he had written in 1979, which began with a report that he had passed away after his fifteenth divorce and sixteenth wedding. Frost wondered if he could write such a piece today.
MAILER: Oh, I wouldn’t dare. I’m married to a young, lively, proud and slightly—as she grows into imperiousness every year—woman. So, she wouldn’t, she’d not look lightly on that.
FROST: That’s right. No fifteen divorces. No sixteen weddings. Number six looks as though it’s going to last forever.
MAILER: Oh, I think so. I think so.
He had no desire to see marriage number six end, but he wasn’t sure that Norris felt the same. She held the cards.
In Chicago, the Mailers’ driver and guide (hired by Random House) was none other than Eileen Fredrickson, whom he had helped get a job driving visiting writers around town. Norris was astonished, and thought Mailer was being cruel. As they drove, Norris saw that Fredrickson “obviously adored him.” Fredrickson said that while it was a terribly awkward situation, Norris was “very gracious.” Mailer invited her to a reception for him that night, and she attended but was the first person to leave. “Even though I was an adulteress,” she said, “I was still a lady.” The situation repeated itself in Los Angeles, where Mailer pointed out another old girlfriend (possibly Lois Wilson) in the audience. The fact that they were much older than she gave Norris no solace. “These women took over my life, I couldn’t think of anything else; we couldn’t seem to talk about anything else.” Norris wasn’t sure what to do; she prayed at night. It was the worst of times.
When they returned, Sam Donaldson and an ABC television crew came to their apartment for an interview with both Mailers about Harlot’s Ghost. It was not Norris’s favorite book, especially after she learned that Mallory was the model for the sluttish Maine waitress, Chloe. Norris liked Donaldson’s “devilish air,” and they got on well. With the camera rolling, he asked what it was like to live with Norman Mailer. She shot back her answer: “Well, Sam, it’s kind of like living in the zoo. One day Norman is a lion; the next he’s a monkey. Occasionally he’s a lamb, and a large part of the time he’s a jackass.” Donaldson laughed; Mailer looked shocked. When the segment aired, Norris’s answer was retained.
An old boyfriend, a bachelor surgeon in Atlanta, called her with concern after he saw the show, and she told him that she was thinking of leaving Mailer. The doctor invited her to visit. She declined and decided instead to go to Arkansas and see her parents and best friend, Aurora Huston. It was now late in the year, and Norman went skiing with Stephen and John. Norris enjoyed seeing her family, and then she, Aurora, and Aurora’s husband, Phil, drove to Florida, where they met another old friend. “I was on the brink of totally changing my life and was giddy with possibilities,” she said. But she was also worried. She had a comfortable life, loved all of Mailer’s family
, enjoyed their two homes and many friends, and the freedom she had to write and paint and act. She and her two friends talked over the situation at length.
While Norris was away, Mailer called up a friend, filmmaker James Toback, and asked him to meet him for dinner at Nicola’s. They enjoyed one-on-one dinners, and shared what Toback called “extremely intense personal conversations” of the kind not to be repeated. He had witnessed Mailer’s complicated relationships with several wives and mistresses, and watched him move from one to another. “There was never any notion, certainly in my observation, and I think in his, that he would ever find someone who would be the last.” But when he listened to the way Mailer talked about Norris, he saw that the “endless cycle” had come to an end. Mailer told him why he had asked him to dinner.
“Listen, the real reason I had to see you tonight is that I have a hole at the center of my being. I’ve never felt anything like it.” I said, “Why is that?” And he said, “Well, Norris has left and I don’t know if she’s going to come back.” He went on saying, “I did certain things and she confronted me and I confessed. Part of me wanted to lie. I felt if I lied I could get away with it, but I just couldn’t get myself to lie, so I confessed. And that was it and she left.” He said, “I don’t regret having told the truth, but I don’t know what to do with this feeling; it’s the worst feeling I’ve ever had.”
So I volunteered, because I felt that’s what he was looking for me to do. I said, “I’ve had that feeling on many occasions and I call it a bad abscessed tooth ache of the soul.” And he said, “You can come up with something better than that.”
A short time later, Mailer called Toback and said. “Well, she’s back and I’m not going to do anything to cause her to leave again.”
Norris had a brief encounter with the Atlanta surgeon although it “felt desperately wrong,” she said. But the one-night stand had nevertheless enhanced her sense of self and made her ask herself: “Why had I been consumed by this old, fat, bombastic, lying little dynamo?” They went to dinner at a local restaurant, where Norris told him about the surgeon, more to hurt him than to be forgiven, and then announced that she was leaving him. Calmly, without tears, she began to discuss living arrangements after the marriage ended. He’d been through this with his other wives; it was an old routine for him. But he recoiled, slapped the table, his invariable reflex: “No, no, no, no, no,” he barked. “We are not breaking up.” Everyone in the restaurant was watching.
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