Posner’s Case Closed was another factor. If it had not been published, Schiller said, “I would have insisted that we go out and do research for the second part of the book.” But Posner had already picked the bones fairly clean. Schiller said it made no difference to him which side of the controversy Mailer came down on; his concern was the freshness of the material. In Gilmore’s case, the material he and Mailer had collected was pristine, and the same was true of the Minsk material. This was not the case with the assassination. Whatever the Warren Commission had missed had been located by Posner, Edward Jay Epstein, and other investigators, including Priscilla Johnson McMillan, the author of Marina and Lee, one of the best studies of Oswald’s psychology. Mailer cited all three in his bibliography, and relied heavily on McMillan, although the Warren Commission Report was his chief source.
Schiller wanted Mailer to write a book that made news, something he had always strived for, and continued with books about O. J. Simpson, JonBenét Ramsey, and the Russian spy Robert Hanssen. He valued Mailer’s interpretive and storytelling skills, but he wanted their collaborations to be the first draft of history, and the second half of Oswald’s Tale is a twice- or thrice-told tale, however intelligently deployed. Getting a story on the front page of newspapers, or on network news, was always Schiller’s goal. As he said later about Oswald’s Tale, “We can talk about a book that’s well written and we can talk about a book that’s well written that’s going to sell well. Norman had long passed the point of caring whether his books sold or not. I believe that.” Mailer had told Schiller that he wrote Ancient Evenings for people who had not been born, readers a century hence. Schiller conceded, however, that there is “brilliance” in parts of “Oswald in America,” and the concluding section on Oswald’s wife and mother “stands alone. No question.” There Mailer describes Oswald and Marina’s last night together.
Marina had put off Oswald when he wanted to make love the night before the assassination, Mailer wrote. She was angry with him and wanted to “discipline him.”
Afterward, she had to think, What if he really wanted to be close to me? What if I put him in a bad mood? It torments her. What if they had made love that last night? But she is the wrong person to talk about this, she would say, because she is not a sexual person. Sensuous but not sensual. She didn’t like sex, she would say. She was not expert, nor could she tell you how grandiose something had been, because she had never experienced that. No Beethoven or Tchaikovsky for her, not in bed, no grand finale.
Remarried after Oswald’s murder, Marina was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. She didn’t want to die, although her suffering was palpable.
She sits in a chair, a tiny woman in her early fifties, her thin shoulders hunched forward in such pain of spirit under such a mass of guilt that one would comfort her as one would hug a child. What is left of what was once her beauty are her extraordinary eyes, blue as diamonds, and they blaze with light as if, in divine compensation for the dead weight of all that will not cease to haunt her, she has been granted a spark from the hour of an apocalypse others have not seen. Perhaps it is the light offered to victims who have suffered like the gods.
Marina’s mother-in-law has her own burden, and it is “difficult not to feel some guarded sympathy for Marguerite Claverie Oswald. As with Lee, the internal workings of her psyche were always condemned to hard labor, and so much of what she tried, and with the best intentions, would fail.” Asked by the interviewers of the Warren Commission if she had any family with her, she answered: “I have no family, period. I brought three children into the world, and I have sisters, I have nieces, I have nephews. I have grandchildren, and I’m all alone. That answers that question and I don’t want to hear another word about it.” She would die alone, riddled with cancer and guilt. Mailer imagines that when Mrs. Oswald reached the Bureau of Karmic Reassignment, she probably argued with the bureaucrats, “dissatisfied with the low station, by her lights, of her next placement. ‘I gave birth to one of the most famous and important Americans who ever lived!’ she will tell the clerk-angel who is recording her story.”
There she stands with her outrageous ego, and her self-deceit, her bold loneliness, and cold bones, those endless humiliations that burn like sores. Yet, she is worthy of Dickens. Marguerite Oswald can stand for literary office with Micawber and Uriah Heep. No word she utters will be false to her character; her stamp will be on every phrase. Few people without a literary motive would seek her company for long, but a novelist can esteem Marguerite. She does all his work for him.
IN LATE SPRING 1994, as the Oswald book was nearing completion, he accepted an assignment from Esquire to write a profile of Madonna. It came in the wake of her appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. She had said “fuck” several times on the live show, and “the results,” Mailer wrote, “produced a two-day Kristallnacht in the media.” She was called sick, sordid, outrageous, and stupid for using the F-word, which CBS had adroitly bleeped every time. But Letterman had, of course, encouraged her, and Mailer was on Madonna’s side. “Letterman,” he said, “would not be caught dead offering one indication of how to conduct your life. Keep it meaningless and we’ll all get along.” Mailer mentioned his support to Liz Smith, the gossip columnist, and she wrote about it. This led to a call to his new agent, Andrew Wylie (Scott Meredith had died in 1991), from the editor of Esquire. The offer was made more attractive by the challenge of writing about someone with “an ego even larger than his own.” He opens the piece by describing her as “a pint-size Italian American with a heart she hopes is built out of the cast-iron balls of the paisans in generations before her.” Mailer reverted to the third person personal in “Norman Mailer on Madonna: Like a Lady,” which is half conversation and half profile.
The piece covers predictable territory: obscenity, sexuality, censorship, the women’s movement, AIDS, birth control, the loneliness of celebrity, and the sensuality of Catholicism. Mailer brings in Warren Beatty, Marilyn Monroe, and Andy Warhol as points of reference. He praises Madonna’s ability “to take her kinks to the public.”
She offers no balm to sweet, sore places; she is the stern instructor who shows us how difficult it all is, especially sex in its consummation. Yet she gives us something Marilyn never could, something less attractive but equally valuable: she dramatizes for us how dangerous is any human’s truth once we dare to explore it; she reminds us that the joys of life bed down on broken glass.
He ends this reverie with a line used by Dougy Madden in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, one Mailer had taken to repeating whenever he was confronted by any depiction of humanity out of touch with the brute facts of existence, the answer, so to speak, of Caliban to Ariel: “Inter faeces et urinam, nascimur, she is always telling us, even if she never heard of Saint Odo of Cluny, but indeed it is true. ‘Between piss and shit are we born.’ ” The piece holds interest, but it never soars. Madonna presents the same frank, quirky persona that can be seen in her music videos, and Mailer deals from his existential-excremental deck of cards. He does, however, make two comments that tell us a bit more about his dalliances and reveal the state of his relationship with Norris. The first is made to encourage Madonna to open up more. “Confessions—in good society—breed confessions,” so he tells her that:
Certain people cannot live without promiscuity. There have been years of my life when I was young when that was absolutely true. I had this feeling that something was near death in me . . . that something was trapped, and it was symbolized by the word cancer. To break out of this trap, I had to take on many roles, because every time you make love with someone else, you are in a new role, you are a new person.
Promiscuity for the young Mailer was health; like Rousseau he equated the satisfying of his sexual urges with both health and freedom, although unlike the Enlightenment philosophes, there was always a guilty edge to his adventures. The older Mailer is ready for limits and quid pro quos, as his second comment shows. The assigned photographer attempted to get a s
hot of Madonna sitting on Mailer’s lap. Madonna was willing, but Mailer, at five foot seven, two hundred pounds, wearing a black dinner jacket that made him resemble “a barrel wrapped in velvet,” said no.
He had a mate who was all too proficient at bringing up old scores for the thrice-weekly bickerfest. So he certainly didn’t want a photograph of himself sitting in a chair, girded in his black dinner jacket, while Madonna in a green gown was perched on his lap, one breast exposed. It is interesting to note that ten years ago, Mailer would have said to himself, “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead—Madonna on my lap!” What we are witnessing is the action of the female mind upon male flesh, otherwise known as the cumulative effect of being pussy-whipped over the course of twenty years by a strong, beautiful, redheaded wife.
A couple of months later, at the end of August, Mailer said that he had “finally met a woman who knows how to dominate me, a fate I’ve been trying to avoid all my life. Of course, like all girls she squeaks and squeals and claims it’s I who dominate her. How smart they are!”
BY SEPTEMBER HE had a complete manuscript of 1,700 pages, a book of 1,000 pages, more or less. Two months later he had it down to 1,400 manuscript pages, which resulted in the published book of 828 pages. The New Yorker, now edited by Tina Brown, who had moved over from Vanity Fair, published a forty-five-page excerpt, including six pages of striking photos of Oswald in Minsk. It was his first (and last) major piece in the magazine, and he was pleased. Another excerpt, in Parade, builds to Mailer’s conclusion: “Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act. Besides, it is too difficult, no matter how one searches for a viable scenario, to believe that others could have chosen him to be the rifleman in a conspiracy.” Mailer said he was 75 percent certain that Oswald acted alone.
Oswald’s Tale was published on May 12, 1995. The reviews were generally positive, the best he had received since The Executioner’s Song. Among the major reviewers, only Michiko Kakutani writing in The New York Times three weeks before the book’s publication date, was dismissive, calling the book “boring and presumptuous, derivative and solipsistic.” The British reviews were even better (it was published in England on September 7). A quartet of major literary figures—Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Allan Massie, and Andrew O’Hagan—was enthusiastic in praise of how Mailer, as O’Hagan put it, recognized “Oswald’s struggle to become a man—to become an important and effective male character—as the foundation of much of his adult distress.” Massie found the portrait of Oswald to be “utterly convincing, partly because it contains so many contradictions.” He was an idealist and a liar, “fiercely independent and emotionally dependent; this one day and the opposite the next. His Oswald is both likable and repulsive; to be pitied and feared. He is in many ways, as Mailer insists, like the young Hitler revealed in Mein Kampf.”
When he went to Minsk, Mailer said, “I hoped there would be a smoking gun.” Hitchens observes that Mailer’s “natural writerly prejudice in favour of meaning and pattern over sordid random coincidence,” his desire to find incontrovertible evidence of a conspiracy, made it difficult for him “to come to a conclusion that lies athwart his prejudices.” Amis makes essentially the same point: “Everything in Mailer rebels against” the view that JFK “had his brains blown out by a malevolent Charlie Chaplin with a wonky rifle and a couple of Big Ideas.” If Oswald was a lone wolf, Amis says, “All we are left with is absurdity, more garbage, more randomness and rot.” There were only two ways for Mailer to get out of the dilemma: “Either Oswald wasn’t acting alone—or he wasn’t a nonentity.” Confronted by what he learned in Minsk, reinforced by all that he had read, he chose the latter course: no conspiracy, and a complex Oswald; a man dealt a bad hand, in no way heroic, but bold, idealistic in a twisted way, and sympathetic. “What is never taken seriously enough in Oswald,” Mailer said, “is the force of his confidence that he has the makings of a great leader.”
Epstein faxed Mailer an unsigned review that appeared in The Economist. It seems in hindsight that Epstein was correct to call it “the most sensible review yet.” The reviewer said that Mailer, writing thirty years after the event, faced “a doubly ungrateful audience: those who no longer care, and those whose minds are already made up.” Nevertheless, those who could suspend their judgment would see that “Mr. Mailer has produced a masterpiece.” The reviewer notes Mailer’s touch in providing “tiny novelistic details.”
Thus Oswald sits lovingly polishing his rifle for hours; on the evening before the assassination, out in the garden, he tried to catch a butterfly with his baby daughter; when he goes off to work the next morning at the Book Depository in Dallas, he leaves behind a residue of instant coffee in a paper cup and, in a delicate flowered cup on the dresser, his wedding ring.
The details are historically accurate, but in his anatomy of Oswald’s character, the reviewer says, Mailer is unable to resist making Oswald more likable, more tortured, and more substantial than he was. “What Mr. Mailer forgets is that he has told us so much about Oswald that we know just how thin any layer of nobility must be.” In his laudatory review in The New York Times Book Review, Thomas Powers echoes the Economist reviewer—as do a majority of the other reviewers. “I admire Mailer for his effort to understand Oswald, but at some level I feel invited to place a sympathetic arm around the killer’s shoulder,” Powers wrote, and “I’m not about to do it.” The Tolstoyan compassion Mailer sought to create for wretches like Oswald—Powers calls him “an insect” who “brought pain to many and happiness to none”—was unpalatable in 1995 and remains so. Oswald’s Tale, like Ancient Evenings, is another of Mailer’s books for readers a century hence, readers removed from the pain of one of the greatest tragedies of twentieth-century American life.
PORTRAIT OF PICASSO as a Young Man finally appeared on October 15, about three years after it was completed. The fact that it was Mailer’s second published book in five months probably hurt sales. Morgan Entrekin, the Grove/Atlantic publisher, was quoted as saying he was cutting the first printing from 100,000 to 50,000 for this reason. He also said that he hoped book review editors would assign “literary types, rather than more exacting art critics to assess Mailer’s view of another eminence.” His hope was dashed; most of the major reviews were by professionals in the art world, some of whom had written extensively about Picasso. Writing in The New York Times Book Review (Michael Kimmelman), The Nation (Eunice Lipton), and The New York Review of Books (Roger Shattuck), three art critics were unanimous in their opinion that Mailer was “poaching on the turf of taste makers and scholars,” as Robert Taylor (Boston Globe) put it. Kimmelman called the book “clumsy and disappointing” and chided him for missing the influence of the large, robust women in the works of Renoir and Maillol. Shattuck, an old acquaintance of Mailer’s, lectured him on a variety of sins. Mailer’s “most grievous failure” was failing to explain how “Kandinsky in Munich, Malevich in Russia, Mondrian in Holland, and Kupka and Delaunay in Paris crossed the line into non-figurative or ‘abstract’ painting” in his discussion of Cubism. Lipton criticized Mailer for leaving out the estimable views of William Rubin, unaware that he refused to be quoted. Mailer’s speculations on Picassos’s inner life were passed over, for the most part.
Mailer is no art critic; his descriptions of Picasso’s work are solid but unexceptional. He does make a contribution by translating and then quoting adroitly from the memoir of Fernande Olivier, the woman who lived with Picasso from his years of obscurity to his early successes. Mailer’s commentary on their relationship—both were narcissists—is one of the best things in the biography and an addition to Picasso scholarship. But art criticism was not his purpose. His announced goal was “to make Picasso as real as any good character in life or in art.” To show the agonies and ecstasies of Picasso’s early years, he drew on his own. Despite the usual denials, Mailer in more than one interview admitted to traits he shared with Picasso. “At a much higher level,” he told Pete Hamill, “he h
ad the same sort of restlessness in his mind that I have in mine.” Both were short, stocky men possessed of huge energy, large libido, vast ambition, and an unshakable belief in the importance of their artistic missions. Both tried on a variety of masks as they moved from wife to wife, lover to lover. “I don’t mean to compare myself to him,” he said, “but there are certain large similarities.”
He grew up in a family filled with women; my mother had a number of sisters too. He was a spoiled darling. There are people who would say the same about me. Everything that went on in his life seemed to add up for me. Not that I was writing about myself—we’re enormously different. What’s fun is to find someone you understand very well in one way, and have to explore in another.
In an interview with Barbara Probst Solomon, Mailer repeats his comment about Picasso being spoiled: “He was the center of the family. He was king. King at home. Then he would go out in the street. And he was little. And kids would push him around.” It is obvious that he believed that Norman Kingsley Mailer and Pablo Picasso shared similar experiences. He continued: “Well, my mother and aunts did adore me. And I was short. Yes, I can imagine what he was feeling.”
Picasso’s life before thirty, when he “gambled on his ability to reach into mysteries of existence that no one else had even perceived,” corresponds closely to Mailer’s. After that, their experiences diverge. Mailer said he had no desire to write about Picasso’s later life. “After Cubism,” he said, “he lost his navigator; there’s no narrative thread to his life after 1917.” He does comment briefly on Picasso’s final years, however, when their experiences are again similar. His insights into Picasso in his seventies and eighties vibrate with fellow feeling. He was “doomed,” Mailer wrote, “to relive his obsessions through all ninety-one years of life,” to continue painting until the end “as if work itself could hold death off.” Mailer wrote furiously until just before his own death, and never gave up believing that he had more to accomplish. His comradely biography is summed up nicely by an unnamed reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly: “This is a biography constructed with a fiction writer’s liberty of psychological insight and a fascinated observer’s freedom of personal opinion.” It is not one of his most important books, but it is one of his most readable and autobiographical.
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