Norman was in Chicago doing publicity for Playboy, which was publishing an excerpt of his about-to-be-published book The Fight. He had to do a radio show just at the hour I arrived, but he had given me the address of the Blackstone hotel and told me to take a cab—which I had never done, either—and wait for him in the room. I was trying to pretend I wasn’t a total rube as the cabdriver threw my bag into the car and I gave him the address, although there was no hiding my accent. He took off with a screech, and I fell back into the seat like I had been launched from a bean flip. I wasn’t too interested in the scenery of Chicago—I was too intent on the erratic way the cabbie was driving—but I got an impression of tall dark buildings, which made the streets seem narrow and canyon-like. I didn’t know about tipping, and didn’t give him one, so he nearly ran over my foot when I got out. I went into the hotel and asked at the desk for a key to Norman’s room, as he had told me to do. The clerk wouldn’t give it to me.
“Who are you, Miss? I don’t have any instructions to let you go up to Mr. Mailer’s room.”
I was so humiliated. I guessed there were dozens of crazy women who tried to get into famous men’s hotel rooms all the time, and he just assumed I was one more, but I was well dressed, not like a floozy or anything. I was wearing a big straw cartwheel hat and a nice beige pants suit and tall wedge-heeled sandals. I tried nicely talking him into it, but he wouldn’t budge and became rude. I wasn’t used to being treated like that. It made me feel like I was nobody, like some hooker or something, and it was all I could do to keep from crying. There was nothing I could do except sit in the lobby with my suitcase and wait for Norman. The air around my chair was thick with the ice I was sending over to the desk clerk, who ignored me.
“What are you doing out here?” Norman asked, an hour later.
“He wouldn’t let me go up to the room,” I answered, glaring at the clerk, who promptly called for someone to help me with my suitcase. Norman was embarrassed he hadn’t told the clerk I was coming. He hadn’t thought there would be any problem. I was so happy to see him, though, it didn’t matter, and he shortly made up for it.
I had brought along an African dashiki—a kind of batik short robe—that I’d bought in Mrs. Marshall’s art shop, and when Norman saw it, for some reason he said, “Is this for me?” I, of course, had to say yes, and he put it on and wore it. I admit he did look cute in it. He had good legs, nicely muscled, if a little short and a tad bowed, and good posture. Cute little butt and a round belly I was particularly fond of—not too fat at all, nicely firm, like a soccer ball. I’ve always liked guys with little bellies, rather than those hard six-pack stomach things. Who wants to hug someone you bounce off like a brick wall? He was hairy, front and back, which I have always loved, too, and he walked with a kind of bearlike swagger, hands on his hips, which I thought was sexy. My own teddy bear. I was sorry to see the dashiki go, however, and I never saw it again. I have no idea what happened to it, but if he had come home to me from a trip with such a garment in his suitcase, I would have probably pitched a fit and then thrown it away.
Chicago was good practice, the hors d’oeuvres for New York, which came a few weeks later. It was a big city that wasn’t too overwhelming but full of wonderful things I had never seen before. We went to fancy restaurants with flowers on linen tablecloths and maître d’s in tuxedos, and I loved how the staff treated us like stars, seating us at the best tables, hovering around and offering us little treats as gifts from the chef. Norman knew a lot about wine, of which I was completely ignorant, and I discovered it was a totally different beverage than the sweet soda pop wine I had been drinking in Arkansas. “You don’t have to get the most expensive French wine on the list. In fact, those are sometimes the most sour. Get a good medium-priced California wine. Merlot is good. Get a good merlot, or a chardonnay if you want a sweeter white wine. You never drink red wine with fish, you know, or white wine with meat.”
“Why not? What difference does it make?” I really wanted to know. I could just about drink white, but red seemed beyond my capabilities.
“Red is heavier, and meat is heavier. You need the weight to wash down the meat. Besides, people will know you’re a hick if they see you drinking the wrong wine, and won’t respect you.” Ah. The old “What will people think?” That I understood. Although I was surprised that Norman would care. He seemed like he didn’t much care what people thought, but we all have our Achilles’ heels, I suppose.
I didn’t like red wine, but made myself sip it and pretend it was delicious, and after a while it got easier to tolerate. I have never liked any kind of liquor, except maybe a little rum in sweet juice punches like mai tais, or sweet amaretto over ice, and I usually put ice in my white wine. But Norman loved teaching me. He had a great time playing Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle, introducing me to exotic things like escargot, which I ate enthusiastically, if with trepidation. I liked it, of course, for the garlicky butter sauce, as the snails themselves didn’t have much taste, and I felt sophisticated pulling them out of their shells with the tiny, clever forks.
At one restaurant, we ran into a nice poet named Paul Carroll, who sat with us and talked for a while about the poetry center he had started, and about Allen Ginsberg, a poet I had hardly heard of who sounded absolutely crazy. (I met him later and discovered he was indeed crazy, but in a good way.) A lot of people smiled and stared at us, and I realized they were eavesdropping on our conversation as if they were at the theater. (That was one thing that always annoyed me, the way people would unabashedly listen in to our conversations in restaurants. Norman always loved to discuss things of a personal nature, too, in his big loud voice, and no amount of shushing him could ever get him to stop it.) I tried to listen with interest to Norman and Paul’s conversation and not betray my ignorance of poetry. Norman used to say that I didn’t open my mouth for the first three years we were together, which wasn’t true at all of course, but I did subscribe to Abraham Lincoln’s old adage “Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” I resolved to read more poetry and try to wean myself from Rod McKuen.
After dinner, we went to hear jazz, another thing I had never done. In high school choir we had sung everything from show tunes to Russian dirges, and of course there was music at church and good old rock and roll, but I was totally ignorant of jazz and was a little nervous when we went into the smoky, dim club. Carol, Norman’s companion at that time, had been an up-and-coming jazz singer in the fifties, and that was intimidating to me, too; I was an interloper in a world that was hers, with her man. I didn’t mention my fears to him. I just pretended I was secure and confident, and he was happy to be there with me. I was wearing a tight pair of pale gray knit pants with an off the shoulder top and high-heeled lizard sandals, and my red hair fell in waves down over my shoulders. I instinctively knew that Norman needed a strong, confident woman, and that was what I was determined to be.
In a spotlight on a small stage, a man named Sonny Stitt was playing a saxophone, with a couple of other guys on the piano and bass. There was no beat, no dancing, just cool people sitting and drinking, nodding their heads to some rhythm I couldn’t seem to pick up. Norman ordered a white rum and tonic, with a topper of water and lemon—very important that it’s lemon, not lime. A rum and tonic Presbyterian, he called it. It was his drink for many years. (I later pieced together that during his turbulent earlier years, of which at this time I was more or less ignorant, his drink of choice had been bourbon. Only once did I ever see him seriously drink bourbon. It was on the campaign plane with Jimmy Carter when he was running for president, and Norman absolutely turned into someone else, as opposite from the man I knew as Mr. Hyde was from Dr. Jekyll—someone I didn’t like at all, rude and snide and argumentative, not only with me but with others as well. He was so bad, I seriously considered getting another flight and going home, and I might have if it had been in any other situation. He was contrite afterward, and said he wouldn’t drink bourbon
again. He seemed to know what it did to him. They don’t call it “spirits” for nothing.)
At the jazz club, I ordered a white wine, which I sipped the rest of the evening. When the band took a break, Sonny put down his sax and came straight over to us. He and Norman embraced like old friends (he embraced me, too, a good one), although I don’t think they really knew each other well, if at all. (Celebrities are always happy to see one another; it is as if you are the only Little Person in the room and suddenly you see another one. Aha! A member of my tribe!) Sonny invited us to hang around until after the second set and then go out with him for a drink somewhere else, but Norman said that would be impossible. Sonny tried to convince him, but to no avail, so he finally had to let it be and go back and perform again. We left well before the second set was completed. I later learned that before she met him, Norman’s ex-wife (the one he was still married to) Beverly had once had a big affair with Miles Davis, so Norman wasn’t keen on history repeating itself, I suppose. All that history with the wives! Well, I vowed to make a little history myself, and try not to worry about it.
The next day, we went to the art museum. I saw paintings and sculptures I had only seen in books. At the Arkansas Arts Center, I used to pack up my high school kids to go to look at a single Andrew Wyeth painting that they’d have on loan, and here were walls full of them! Norman bought me a necklace at the gift shop, a golden filigree pendant that was copied from a Spanish piece. He said he wanted to see me wearing it and nothing else, and later that afternoon I obliged. He kept saying I smelled of cinnamon—maybe it was some perfume I was wearing—and he jokingly said if I ever became a stripper, I should call myself Cinnamon Brown. (Remember the old game we used to play as kids, where you take the name of your first pet and the name of the street on which you grew up and put them together to get your stripper name? Mine would have been Blacky St. Mary, which actually is kind of better than Cinnamon Brown. His would have been Dukie Crown, which is also a pretty good one, come to think of it.)
When I got back home to Arkansas, I knew my life had already begun to change.
To Barbara Norris:
… Cinnamon Brown, that’s your other female, the tall jaunty slightly mysterious red-headed woman who can’t walk into a bar without turning it on since there’s a sexual voltage comes off you then of which you may even be unaware, and that lady, of course, is a distance away from Barbara who is looking to have one love till she dies and wants to make an art of that love so that she gives strength and gains strength and tenderness passes forward and back. And I, of course, love those ladies because there’s one of them for each of me, Barbara for Norman since he is probably as tender as she is (that is saying a lot) and as much in love with the religion of love which is to make it with one’s mate and thereby come out to a place very few people visit and you can be true to that idea of love; then another side not so different from Cinnamon, a cold creation full of lust who might just as well have a name like Ace or Duke or some such hard-cock name far from Norman—and yet not a bad side, no worse than Cinnamon, for so much of the action is there, even an instinct for some of the better adventures.
I used to be that way when I was twenty-six; I still am. One past needs to be in love—the other can remain in love only so long as the love keeps changing, and so if it is the same woman, the ante keeps rising. There has to be more and more. Of course one cannot always name what more might be—it is rather that one has to believe it is possible. Then the two sides of my nature can come together. I know it is the same with you.
Sometimes I think of everything in the scheme of things which is not designed for us—the physical distance, Matt on your side and all my children on mine, my two years of chronology to each of yours, our cultures—for New York as you will see is a culture—and just as I might not be able to live for long in Arkansas, so might you not be able to endure the East; a cold and competitive place you will find if you live in it long enough, and then there’s all you have to learn, and all I have to remember and to keep from losing, and yet I feel curiously optimistic, as if we will never lose the best part of each other for all those reasons, but only because there is finally not enough magic and/or balls in one of us or the other or both of us together to keep our opposites in that lovely tension which would not cease in Little Rock or Chicago. So I do not worry about our betraying each other… my happiness, and then my optimism is that at last I know a woman who understands love the way I do and has the same kind of confidence and the same respect—it soon becomes fear—that such a love can make in its resonance toward everything about it. This kind of love is dangerous in its essence possibly because its potential harmony is so great that every devil in you and me will be disturbed by it, and the devils in others will hate us. Still we have our chance. We have that lovely balance between us and that fucky imbalance which keeps us pawing each other and exploring each other and looking to surprise one another—there’s such delight in the surprises, and that funny confidence we each feel where we’re just happy to be with each other.
So I don’t worry. I think we have a little time at least in this happy state and the confidence that if we have it in us truly, nothing will grind it down, and if we don’t, well God we’ve been blessed a little already and I love Cinnamon Brown and Barbara Norris ’cause as you know they’re both divine.
Hey, I miss you
right now,
Norman Kingsley
P.S. How did you know that Kingsley was my middle name? I wonder if I have a use for it at last.
P.P.S. Nope. It’s no better than Ace or Duke. Call me Roger.
Sixteen
I did call my parents from Chicago, and it was as bad as I’d thought it would be—another round of “How can you do this to us? How can you do this to Matthew?” I was beginning to see that I couldn’t talk to them about any of it. They forced me to sneak around, which made me feel horrible, but finally they began to understand that Norman wasn’t going away in a hurry. He was one year—almost to the day—older than my father, and while they didn’t know many of the particulars of his reputation, they knew enough to be worried for me. I was learning more about him every time we talked. He was certainly candid about his past, but it seemed like the stories he was telling me were about somebody else, maybe an older black sheep brother who’d gotten into pointless fights, had gotten married a lot of times, and had—God forbid—in a drunken, drugged-out bout of psychosis, stabbed one of his wives. I just couldn’t reconcile that wild man with the funny, smart, loving man he was when he was with me. It wasn’t possible he could be capable of that kind of behavior, or at least not anymore. I knew in my gut he was a good man, and my gut had seldom been wrong; whenever I had gone against it I’d always been sorry.
In return for telling me about his foibles, he wanted to hear stories of my past, especially the boyfriends—it seemed to turn him on—but I frankly didn’t have all that much to tell him, and when he kept insisting on more, I made up a couple of affairs that never happened and embellished the ones that had. Later I was sorry I had done that, and finally confessed I had made some of it up, but at the time he was so disappointed that I had nothing else to tell him, and I wanted to please him. Maybe he didn’t want to believe how young and naïve I was.
My first act of rebellion had been to marry Larry, but when we divorced, that was bad, too. My parents’ generation was of the era that believed “You made your bed. Now you have to lie in it.” Forever. You married the first person you went to bed with, as a matter of course. The principal fear that kept you in line was “What will people say?” Well, people in that small town said plenty. When word got out that I was seeing Norman Mailer, I was the center of gossip, and when I actually quit my job and moved to New York to live with him, that is all anyone talked about. (The reactions were pretty mixed between the people who felt sorry for me and the people who felt sorry for him.)
One older woman whom I knew only slightly gave out the word that I was putting Matthew up for ado
ption, which really hurt me. I don’t know what was worse, the stupid gossips or the friends who raced to tell me everything that was said. For some people, there is a perverse pleasure in the pain of friends. As our old friend Gore Vidal famously said, “It isn’t enough to succeed; your friends must fail.” Even my dearest friends thought I had lost my mind and that I would stay in New York awhile and then come to my senses and move back to Arkansas.
After Chicago, Norman called almost every day and wrote wonderful letters several times a week. We exchanged a lot of pictures, and a huge box of his books arrived. I dutifully set out to read them all in order, starting with The Naked and the Dead, and for the most part succeeded, which was a big mistake in a lot of ways, as I was in no way ready to have that plethora of ideas and bombast of language thrust into my brain all at once. I absorbed as much as I could, though, enough to know whom I was dealing with a little bit better. I liked The Naked and the Dead. It was a good war story that had funny, true moments. I laughed out loud in some places. (“What is this stuff?” one of the soldiers in the chow line says. “Owl shit,” answers the tough mess cook, giving him the evil eye. “Okay,” the soldier says. “I just thought it was something I couldn’t eat.”)
A Ticket to the Circus Page 11