Norris realized that she didn’t want it to end. “I loved our life, I even loved him,” she later wrote, and she didn’t want the family, especially John, the only one of his children who had lived continuously with his father past age six, to suffer. But there had to be trust; it was the sine qua non for continuing the marriage. Mailer started talking, using “all his talents and abilities, which were considerable,” and before the meal was finished, he had convinced her of his love; she would be the last Mrs. Norman Mailer. The family was relieved that the crisis was over; they all loved Norris. But the confessions and fights had taken a toll. “I somehow had taken a step away from him in my heart,” she said. It was a necessary step, flowing from her clear-eyed recognition that it might be impossible for him to control his roving eye and promiscuous penis. But he was slowing down, and she hoped he was ready to try monogamy again. He did try, and would be notably, if not perfectly, successful, at least by his own standards. He still loved several women—Carol Stevens, Lois Wilson, and Eileen Fredrickson. Perhaps others. Norris was philosophical: “It was better to be that little bit less in love and not care quite as much,” she wrote.
In an interview two months after Norris died on November 10, 2011, Aurora Huston said that she believed that her best friend and Mailer “were both naive, in their own ways. There was always an innocence about Norris, always.” Aurora and Norris called or e-mailed almost every day. They were utterly frank with each other. Aurora recalled her first meeting with Mailer, and gave her views on their marriage.
The first time I saw them together, I knew they were real partners. Not just in a physical sense or even as a unified public entity. More than anything they were bound together in some deeply rooted corpus that they created together. Unfortunately, the very thing they created and loved was made from bits and pieces of their very souls. Norman was a hard man to love. His genius was also his folly. He thought himself right in every thought, word, and action. Norris, however much she loved him, was not going to let him get away with his foolishness. I do believe they loved each other until the very end, but they tore at the flesh of their relationship. Norris, in my opinion, humanized Norman and made him see the damage caused by his reckless behavior. Norman had too large an ego to look into the mirror and accept his reflection. He needed to be adored; he needed to be lustfully adventurous with careless bravado. The very traits that made her fall madly in love with him, made him alarmingly, ferociously, untamable. Nothing happened to their love, in truth, though both will swear differently. Life happened along the way. Disappointment, waves of illness and old age. Wherever they are, the undisputed truth is that they loved each other.
Norris also had a brief affair with someone she had known for years, and it confirmed her belief that she could also be happy with someone else. But her life, she wrote, was bound up with Norman, “that crazy wild man,” and the affair, her last, was short-lived. “I knew that if I left him I would wonder the rest of my life what he was up to, and be sorry I wasn’t with him.” Slowly, as Mailer was covering the political conventions in the summer of 1992, their marriage began to heal.
The inscription in Norris’s copy of Harlot’s Ghost, dated October 1991, reflects the tensions of their marriage at that moment.
To my baby wife alias the wise woman who is my dear lady and a hoyden heart mean as piss on rare occasions and lovely as a forest clearing when all is still, namely princess, I adore you Norman
In 1995, after their marriage had settled back into an easy groove, he dedicated Oswald’s Tale to her.
To Norris, my wife, for this book and for the other seven that have been written through these warm years, these warm twenty years we have been together.
IN EARLY 1992, Mailer began work on a short biography of Picasso. Even in the most trying times of the crisis, he went to his studio almost every day to write. His plan was to knock it off in six months, and then turn to “Harlot’s Grave.” Whatever might happen to his marriage, his literary activities would continue. He had first gotten interested in Picasso’s work in his senior year at Harvard when he had taken a modern art course, which he said was the most enjoyable course he had taken in all four years—he got an A. He had always been interested in the way that Picasso’s style kept changing, much as his own did. “I could’ve written under several different names,” he said, “and gotten away with it.” In the spring of 1962, he had signed a contract with Macmillan to write the biography and spent “eight happy weeks” at the Museum of Modern Art leafing through fifteen thousand reproductions of the great artist’s work. “I think if you have a sensibility and you spend two intense months with Picasso the way I did, it just sits inside of you like a time bomb.” But he shelved the project.
Thirty years later, he tried again. All through the first half of 1992 he worked on what would eventually be called Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, completing it in September. The biography is 125,000 words in length, contains over two hundred illustrations, and takes Picasso from his birth through the Cubist period, ending in the early years of World War I. It is not a scholarly biography but an interpretive one that tries to explain the complexities of Picasso’s character. Mailer borrowed freely and heavily from the work of a score of biographers, memoirists, and art critics. His most important borrowings are from the memoir of Picasso’s mistress Fernande Olivier, and from the first volume of the authorized biography by John Richardson. “Nothing, of course, can equal the scholarship of John Richardson’s book,” Mailer said, “but I think mine may give a closer sense of what it would have been like if one had known Picasso personally as a young man.” The book is dedicated to Judith McNally, who did invaluable research for it.
Jeanne Campbell had introduced Mailer to Richardson and his partner, Douglas Cooper, in the summer of 1962 in the south of France. Mailer recalled getting drunk with them. He had hoped that Richardson would introduce him to Picasso, but for whatever reason this did not occur. In 1991, Richardson published the first volume of his biography, covering the years 1881 to 1906, just before Mailer began work on his. Mailer read it, quoted extensively from it, some eight thousand words; there was a good deal of paraphrasing as well. Jason Epstein, also Richardson’s editor, found himself in a difficult situation. Richardson’s second volume, The Painter of Modern Life, which would take Picasso up to 1916, was well under way, and the prospect of two Random House biographies covering the same period and being published at the same time was awkward. “I was apprehensive,” Epstein said, “and told Mailer there might be a problem.” But in the late summer of 1992, before the problem came to a head, Mailer got a call from Larry Schiller.
SCHILLER HAD DEVELOPED extensive contacts with Russian high officials, including members of the KGB. His translator (and later his wife), Ludmilla Peresvetova, introduced him to the head of the KGB, Vadim Bakatin, and through him he was introduced to the top KGB official in Minsk, Aleksandr Sharkovsky. Schiller was informed that the KGB was interested in exploring the possibility of giving him access to its file on Lee Harvey Oswald, who had lived in Minsk in 1960–62. This file had been sealed since 1963, and everyone who had known Oswald had been warned to remain silent. But under glasnost life had changed, and the KGB realized that it possessed a property that could be monetized. Schiller explained the situation to Mailer, whom he wanted as a collaborator on the project, and found him to be “very interested, eager.” Next, Schiller went to see Epstein, who agreed to fund additional trips to Moscow and Minsk. Epstein did not reveal, according to Schiller, that investigative reporter Gerald Posner was already working on a book on the assassination for Random House. At that time the two books didn’t seem to have much in common, less, in fact, than the biographies of Picasso by Richardson and Mailer.
Mailer loved to drop everything, mobilize his energies, and launch in a new direction. Metaphorically speaking, he always kept a bag packed on the chance he would hear the train whistle of a new adventure, which could lead to new energy, new success. At this point in his life,
the Oswald-KGB project had immense appeal. “I had a double motive,” he said. First, he wanted to learn about the KGB’s exhaustive scrutiny of Oswald for the new book. He and Schiller would be in the front rank of what he called “the virtual Oklahoma land grab” for long-sealed records. Second, the KGB, he surmised, might have much to tell him about JFK’s assassination, even if Oswald was not involved. Information on how the agency functioned in the old Soviet Union, now dismembering, and how it responded to the assassination, would “get me beefed up for the second volume of Harlot’s Ghost.” There was a further incentive: the project would take him out of temptation’s way and allow the recriminatory air between him and his wife to clear. He had no idea of the shape of the book he would write, but that didn’t concern him. “Oswald’s Years in Russia” was the working title that Schiller had given Epstein. Beyond that, it was all guesswork. Like Holmes and Watson, if you will, Mailer and Schiller were going on a long journey to solve a mystery.
From September of 1992 through the spring of 1993, Mailer spent the bulk of his time in Minsk and Moscow, even celebrating, quietly, his seventieth birthday in the Russian capital. Schiller, recently divorced from his second wife, was in one or the other city almost continuously through this period. Mailer flew back and forth several times for various reasons, including a trip to Dallas to meet Oswald’s widow, Marina, arranged by Bill Majeski, the New York City detective responsible for Abbott’s arrest. They also traced Oswald’s footsteps around Dallas after the assassination, and made a one-day trip to New Orleans, where Oswald had also lived. He also came back for his appearance in Don Juan in Hell at Carnegie Hall on February 15. But for most of this eight-month period, he was in Minsk. Norris was worried that he might be “schtupping fat, old, ugly Russian women in babushkas,” but Mailer was faithful and focused on Oswald.
Living conditions in Minsk were uncomfortable, especially once winter arrived. It was bitter cold. The sun, rarely visible through the endless snow, set in mid-afternoon. “I doubt if there were 10 sunny days,” Mailer recalled. “Nothing to do but work. No night life.” Mailer wrote to Knox about the food.
It doesn’t matter how rich you are, you cannot buy yourself a decent restaurant meal in Minsk, so the biggest gastronomic sensations in the last five months while living there are the scrambled eggs I make myself, or the borscht, or once or twice, the tuna with cabbage. It’s a sad place, and I’ll tell you about it when I see you, for it made me realize how Russian I am, even though Minsk is in Belarus (White Russia rather than Russia itself, and a separate country now) but it doesn’t matter—one gets a sense of what life was like in the old Soviet Union.
He was exaggerating a bit, because Schiller, ever the dealmaker, soon came up with a way to get good food. After they had established relations with the KGB, he gave various officials (including Marina Oswald’s aunt, Valya Prusakova, whose late husband had been a colonel in counterintelligence) cash to buy food on the black market. Then, the two overweight Americans were invited for lunch or dinner a few times a week; if they had borscht for lunch, they might have lamb for dinner, and some caviar. When Norris came for a two-week visit, she scrounged through the markets, buying beets and carrots, chunks of gristly beef rolled in newspaper, and “small hard eggs that came in a plastic sack of twenty, eggs squeezed from the butts of sturdy little chickens that continually pecked the frozen ground in search of an insect or a worm, scratching out a living like everybody else.” Schiller didn’t cook, and Mailer had a limited repertoire (including some decent pasta), so they ate better during Norris’s stay. The visit was good for the marriage. After Norris returned, she told her last lover that she was staying with Mailer. “I’m not sorry we had our little fling,” she told the lover. “It made me see that I really loved Norman, for better or worse.”
Mailer and Schiller were shown the tiny apartment where Oswald and Marina lived, and the one above that the KGB used as a listening post. They met the Soviet rifle expert who attempted to duplicate Oswald’s marksmanship, and they had several desultory meetings with Sharkovsky and his staff. All that they had been told of any consequence was that the Soviet Union had no hand in the murder of JFK. The officials were leery about receiving cash payments, but there was one thing they ardently desired: shoes. Schiller was given a list of sizes and types and arranged for a truckload of expensive footwear to be driven in from Austria and unloaded at KGB headquarters. He was also busy making arrangements for food and gifts—for example, getting Aunt Valya’s television set fixed by a black market repairman—and getting his technology set up. He brought in expensive optical scanning and duplicating equipment (plus toner and paper), and made arrangements to send material out daily via Sprint satellite data transfer. When Mailer wasn’t doing interviews with Schiller—they interviewed fifty or sixty people, all told—Mailer spent his time reading the Warren Commission Report. His eyesight wasn’t good, so Schiller arranged to have excerpts from the twenty-six volumes blown up to double size.
One night in his overheated apartment, Mailer was cooking pasta for Schiller. Just the two of them were there, Schiller recalled. Mailer, standing over the stove in a sleeveless undershirt, pointed out that something Schiller had just said or written was jumbled. As they discussed the matter, Mailer said, lowering his voice a little, “Larry, I think you may be dyslexic,” and then explained that he knew about dyslexia from one of his children. Schiller had heard of the disorder, but never thought he might have it. Mailer was always patient with him when he made spelling and grammar mistakes, Schiller said, defining words and giving him short grammar lessons now and then. There was never any condescension. When Schiller flew home for Thanksgiving—as did Mailer—he was tested and found that Mailer was correct. Schiller was fifty-six years old, and until then had not been diagnosed with this disability. Mailer’s hunch helped Schiller understand and deal with his long-standing insecurities about reading and writing.
In their first months in Minsk, they spoke to people who had known Oswald and Marina: relatives and former friends of Marina, Oswald’s coworkers at the radio factory where he had worked, neighbors and acquaintances. They had also been given access to the KGB library and some relatively unimportant files. But they still had not been shown the Oswald files. Finally, Schiller’s instincts told him that it was time to force the situation, and he asked his translator, Ludmilla, to set up a luncheon meeting with Sharkovsky and his top staff at KGB headquarters. He pondered what he would say, but wrote nothing down, trusting his spontaneity. Mailer had no speaking role; he was to play the great writer and sit in august silence. In a brief biography written for the KGB by Schiller and Ludmilla, he was described as the American equivalent of Tolstoy.
After the elaborate lunch, Schiller began to speak, with Ludmilla translating. He said that if the Oswald files were given to the media, it would be disputed or forgotten. “But,” he continued, “if you give it to a writer, such as Mr. Mailer, whose works are on the shelves of every library in the world, including your own KGB library, you are giving the information to history. You’re preserving it with an independent voice that will establish the credibility of the fact that the Soviet Union was not involved in President Kennedy’s assassination.” He had their attention, and went on to say that Mailer ranked with Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Ludmilla, “being as brilliant as she was,” Schiller said, did not repeat this comparison, but substituted this: “You give it to a writer who, under his photograph in the Soviet encyclopedia, says Mr. Mailer is ‘a writer who dares write what he thinks.’ ” After he concluded, Sharkovsky said no, he would not give them the files outright. He would, however, rent them an office in the KGB building, “and every time you ask a question, we’ll bring you that part of the files that answers your question. If you stay long enough, and if you’re smart enough to ask the right questions, you will learn much.”
They rented the office for $1,000 a week and went to work. It was a laborious process and much time was spent in discussions about
the wording and sequencing of questions. For weeks they spent five hours a day copying material in Russian from the Oswald file, which consisted of numerous bound volumes kept in potato sacks. Then it was translated into English and sent out daily by satellite.
They worked on through the darkest days in winter, accumulating more and more material. They learned that not long after Oswald arrived in Minsk, the KGB suspected that he had been sent to blow up a new hotel there where Premier Nikita Khrushchev was about to visit. They followed him from store to store as he purchased what looked like the parts for a wireless radio, but it turned out to be a toy he was making for a friend’s child. Another possibility the Soviets considered was that he was a new kind of mole, one who would lie low for decades and then be activated at some critical time. The Soviets had sent similar moles to the United States (ten would be arrested in 2010 after living in the United States for several years). After five months Schiller and Mailer had accumulated eleven thousand pages, including their transcripts of the interviews with people who had known Oswald and Marina.
On several occasions, Mailer and Schiller had major disagreements about how to pursue a line of questioning. One of the biggest fights was about Marina’s virginity when she married Oswald. Was Oswald faking it when he brought a piece of bloody sheet into the radio factory after his wedding night, the traditional Russian proof of deflowering? Some of Marina’s former friends intimated that she had lost her virginity in Leningrad a few years earlier, after which, to get her away from the nightlife, she was sent to Minsk to live with Aunt Valya. There would be other arguments when Schiller, the lead interviewer (as he had been for The Executioner’s Song) would ask a question and Mailer would object and want to ask something different. As Schiller recalled:
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