A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Susan.

  Maggie was the baby—four years old, just six months older than Matthew. I’ll never forget the first time I saw her, when she came to visit with her nana, Myrtle Bennett, who later came and worked for us when I got pregnant with John. Maggie was an adorable little elf; her blue eyes seemed to take up half her face. She was scared and shy, and I could see it wasn’t going to be easy, so I decided to take it slow, to gain her trust when it came. Maggie had wild curly hair, long enough so she could sit on it, like a Liddle Kiddles doll, and her face was a perfect sweet miniature of Norman’s!

  Maggie.

  Danielle, eighteen, was away in college at Bowdoin when I came to New York, and was the last one of the kids I met that November at a dinner at Barbara’s. She had similar coloring to Betsy. (They had the same mother, Adele, Norman’s second wife, who is half-Spanish and half–Peruvian Indian.) But while Betsy had black curly, wiry hair, Danielle’s was long and almost straight, which I so envied. She was a beauty with eggplant-colored eyes; she was lively and funny, and she quickly became another great friend. She’s the kind of girl who can sit next to you on the couch and in ten minutes learn more about you than some of your nearest and dearest friends know. She was a strong, healthy girl, and a good athlete, like I wasn’t, but she was also an artist, like I was.

  All of the kids look like Norman in different ways. All of them have a talent for writing, too, although some of them prefer to do other things. Danielle and Maggie are painters, but both are good writers. Sue is an analyst who writes professional papers; Kate is an actress but has her masters in writing and writes a lot of her own material; Stephen is an actor and is working on a screenplay. Everyone else is a writer in some larger way. My son Matt is a writer-director with a degree from NYU film school, and his senior thesis film called The Money Shot won the Wasserman award, which is NYU’s version of the Oscars. Michael is a movie producer who has written screenplays, and John Buffalo is a playwright-screenwriter, as well as an actor. Norman’s sister, Barbara, worked at Simon and Schuster for many years and edited a book called The Bold New Women, for which she wrote the preface. She is currently writing her memoir. Her only son, Peter Alson, is a journalist who has written about gambling and published two memoirs.

  Peter’s true vocation is poker playing, and he has been in the World Series of Poker several times. Peter was only six years younger than me and was at Harvard when I came onto the scene. Being the only child of Norman’s only sister, he always felt like one of the kids, and was closest to Danielle until the boys got old enough to hang out with him. It was odd to have all these grown-up children, some of them my age or nearly my age, in the role of stepchildren. If any of the kids—except Maggie, of course—were unhappy that Norman and Carol’s relationship was ending, they didn’t tell me. I’m sure they were all confused, unsure of what was going to happen. But they were too well mannered to even be impolite to me, although what they said to one another I can only imagine.

  Peter Alson.

  The one thing Norman always did throughout all the changes of wives was to keep the family together, especially in the summers, so they truly thought of themselves as brothers and sisters, not a collection of half siblings. Maybe by the time I arrived they were all shell-shocked from a surfeit of stepmothers and it was a relief to have someone young they could play with. I don’t know why we all got along so well, and I don’t want to analyze it too much. It just happened, and I was so grateful for having a large, wonderful family. Norman used to say that if the two of us were in the water drowning, the kids would save me first. I’m glad we didn’t have to find that one out.

  I always respected the kids, and tried never to say anything bad about their mothers in front of them, although Norman didn’t share that characteristic. In fact, when one of the kids did something to displease him, he always started chastising them by saying, “You’re just like your mother…” and then he would rant on about whatever bad thing the kid had done that was just like the mother of the moment. He did the same thing to me about my mother even, and once, fed up, I said, “Why don’t you ever say we are like our mothers when we do something good?” He didn’t have an answer to that, but he never gave up the pleasure he got from the comparisons, although it drove all of us crazy.

  I began to meet his friends, too. He didn’t have a lot of literary friends like I thought he would. He was friendly with people such as John Cheever, John Updike, and Saul Bellow when he saw them, and while we sometimes went out to dinner with Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz—Kurt’s girlfriend, later his wife—Norman’s closest friends were from other walks of life. Like Harold and Mara Conrad. Harold was tall and suave with a black pencil mustache. He was a tough reporter in his youth who worked the sports desk for the Brooklyn Eagle, among other papers, and he then was a fight promoter who spoke with a gruff Damon Runyon accent. His wife, Mara, was a dancer and actress in the musical comedy genre, a long-legged blonde who took a lot of Gwen Verdon shows on the road. She had beautiful legs, the straight posture and carriage of a ballerina, two rows of big white teeth, and bottle-blond hair, with a strong dash of Lucille Ball in her personality. She played, among other things, Marilyn Monroe’s girlfriend in Let’s Make Love, and a wild jungle girl (with incongruous red lipstick) in the 1950s Prehistoric Women. Hanging in their apartment was a cool picture of her in a leopard skin from that movie.

  Anyhow, when I first came to New York, Norman wanted to play a joke on Mara, who was a practical joker herself. We cooked up one with the help of Harold. Norman told them he had met a new girl he was crazy about but there were some problems, so he wanted them to take a look at her and give him some advice. He took me over there dressed in a sexy red dress (that I had borrowed from Sarah Johnson, one of my students in Russellville), a cheap blond wig, and a lot of makeup. He told them my name was Cinnamon Brown from Texas (Waco, no less) and that I had come to New York to get into pornographic movies.

  We rehearsed at home, with great glee, and I was prepared, even though I had never seen a pornographic movie. (Norman asked me in Little Rock if there were any theaters that showed them, and I just said, “Huh?”) At the Conrads’, I swept in, brash and loud and trampy, and the two of them had their mouths hanging open, even Harold, who had met me and was in on the joke. (I was having so much fun, saying bad words like a naughty child and pretending to be someone so totally different from myself. I was using words I had never said out loud until I met Norman! At that moment, Norman decided I was going to be a movie star.) We went on and on with the charade, pretending to get into a big fight about my choice of career, him trying to stop me, and me adamant it was what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world. At one point he said to Harold and Mara, “Cinnamon can’t be in pornies. She has no tits!”

  Me as Cinnamon Brown.

  “Tits, what are tits?” I answered. “I have a great pussy!” At that, Mara took Norman into the next room to talk to him while I went and changed into the elegant Diane von Furstenberg dress Norman had bought me at Saks. I took off the wig, brushed out my long red hair, and toned down the makeup.

  The Diane von Furstenberg dress.

  In the other room, Mara was saying, “Look, Norman, you’re in way over your head. You can’t be with a woman like that. She’s too much for you. She’ll kill you. Just let her go and be in the pornies if she wants to. She’ll be great at it. She’ll be a big star and make a ton of money. And you have to stay away from her, got it?”

  “But I think I love her,” he whined.

  “Snap out of it! She’ll never love you. She’s trouble, and you don’t need more of that.” He nodded sadly, and they came back into the living room, where she took one look at me sitting there talking with Harold, and said, “Who are you? Where is Cinnamon?” She was genuinely confused.

  We laughed until tears rolled and our stomachs hurt. She kept saying, “I can’t believe it! You had me. You totally had me!” At that moment, in walked Don King, the fight promoter, who
had that hair that looked like he had just plunged down an elevator shaft, as Norman described him in The Fight. And of course we had to tell him all about it. (The problem is that I think the only sentence he heard was “I have a great pussy,” because he chased me around for years after that evening.)

  The next week, we were invited to Harold and Mara’s house for dinner again, and we couldn’t wait to go, mainly—for me—because Mara always made great fried chicken and mashed potatoes. As we rang the doorbell, we started laughing again at how we had so totally gotten one over on her. She opened up the door and was standing there—stark naked. We screamed. She ran through the house doing pirouettes and saying, “You’ll never get one up on me!”

  Twenty-one

  Fanny by this time knew that I wasn’t Francis Gwaltney’s niece, and I don’t think she cared. It was never mentioned again. She did make one small gesture toward saving Norman’s relationship with Carol, which I think she felt was her duty because of Maggie. When we told her we were going to the fight in Manila, she took me aside and said, “Darling, I want you not to go.” She held my hand as she said it, and I knew she was torn. Here was her beloved son, who could do no wrong in her eyes, breaking up another family, the fifth one, leaving another child, which went against everything in her upbringing. But she had gone through so many of his breakups and remarriages (and one of Barbara’s) that it wasn’t something earth-shattering like the first one must have been. Plus, she liked me, and she wanted him to be happy.

  I didn’t want to hurt her, but I said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I really am, but I’m going with him. We love each other, and we are going to be together.” She stood up, gave me a hug, and said, “Well, I had to try,” and that was that. From then on, she was totally in my corner.

  The flight to Manila was twenty-two hours long. We got to the airport two hours before we had to. I was discovering Norman’s penchant for being on time, which translated to being early for everything. Before we took any kind of a trip, whether it was halfway around the world or to Provincetown, he would go into his travel mood, which was nervous and angry and crotchety. I tried not to talk to him and risk getting my head taken off. Packing was a huge chore for him, and he was so nervous about being late that we were always early for everything. I learned to take a book along everywhere and just relax. I thought of it as free time, no phones, no kids, just my time to sit and read. Even traveling to Manhattan for dinner got him into a tizzy. I can’t count the times we arrived so early that we had to go looking for a bar in which to have a drink and kill a half hour so we wouldn’t be too early to someone’s house. Once, we arrived and the hostess was in the bathtub.

  I told him it must be in his genes, that on the first big trip the Jews ever took, they got lost and wandered in the desert for forty years, so of course he was afraid of traveling. He didn’t think that observation was quite as funny as I did. Other than that, I never used the Jews as reference for anything, I was pretty sensitive, and he didn’t have a sense of humor about it at all. He wasn’t a practicing Jew religion-wise, and there are those who thought he wasn’t Jewish enough in his writing, but he certainly thought of himself as Jewish. On the other hand, he never missed an opportunity to bring up the Christians—Baptists in particular (as he brought up my mother)—to explain why I did “bad” things. Like one Christmas when I was cooking a turkey and I put tinfoil over it to keep it moist. He thought I should leave it uncovered and baste it every twenty minutes like his mother did, which I wasn’t prepared to do, so I didn’t.

  “You’re cooking this turkey like a Christian!” he yelled when he saw I wasn’t going to take off my little tinfoil tent and baste.

  “Well, what the fuck holiday do you think this is!” I yelled back. Christmas was always problematic, but more about that later. Now we were on our way to the Philippines, still besotted with love on the long twenty-two-hour flight.

  My fear of flying wore off after a while and I stopped listening for pings and getting a pounding heart at each little bump. There was an unending parade of food in our first-class cabin, which Don King had paid for—shrimp and caviar, wine, champagne, ice cream sundaes, dinners of steak or chicken or anything else we wanted. One meal rolled into the next one, chocolates and cookies and nuts passed around by beautiful Filipino stewardesses every few minutes, purple orchids decorating everything. Glutted and exhausted, we finally tried to sleep, and I was delighted that the seats reclined all the way down, so we could lie flat.

  There was no chance of snuggling, as there was a console between us, and in his sleep, Norman knocked over a glass of water that dumped right onto my head. I leaped up out of a deep sleep, with my clothes and hair all wet, not knowing what was going on, and I had to dry off as best I could with a towel and then sleep wet. I couldn’t even be mad at him since he didn’t mean to do it, and he felt so bad. Actually, looking back (after I’d dried), it was funny. Kind of. In those days everyone dressed up for flying, and I was wearing the black suit and big black hat (although I wasn’t sleeping in the hat, of course) that I later wore to meet Michael and Stephen. I was pretty disheveled at the end of the flight, rumpled and bleary-eyed, with my contact lenses gummy from my having slept in them. (They were hard lenses, and meant to be taken out at night. Soft ones hadn’t yet been invented.)

  As we stepped off the plane, there were hordes of photographers waiting to snap our pictures. Great. That’s all I needed, with makeup smudged in dark raccoon circles under my eyes, clothes rumpled as if I had slept in them. (Oh. I had.) In the newspapers I looked like the last zombie in a horror movie. At least Norman was wearing something appropriate, a khaki safari jacket and pants that were always wrinkled anyhow, so he looked normal, while my suit and hat were more suitable for a New York winter.

  The first person I saw as we entered the airport was Larry Schiller, a photographer who had worked on Marilyn with Norman and who would figure in our lives over and over throughout the years. He was hurrying up to us, saying, “Do you need money? I’ve just exchanged a lot of money,” and he handed us a stack of bills for which we traded him dollars.

  The hotel was meant to be a tropical paradise; the lobby was full of trees and flowering plants set around a pool. Boxing figures of all kinds were lolling around, drinking pastel drinks with little umbrellas in them. Ken Norton, who later became heavyweight champ, was there, and Larry Holmes, who was Ali’s sparring partner and who also later became champ. I couldn’t get over how big they were in real life, close up. Lazy power came off them, like pumas, even when they were sitting doing nothing. Ken Norton struck up a little conversation with me, and Norman got all chesty and right in the middle of it. Angelo Dundee, Ali’s cornerman, came up, and he and Norman hugged and pounded each other on the back, and I met Bundini Brown, an assistant trainer and cornerman for Ali. Norman knew everyone, it seemed, and they were all interested in his new girlfriend. Don King ambled over smoking a cigar and asked us how the trip had gone. I inched a little closer to Norman. Don had a habit of being particularly huggy with me, and I was wary.

  Harold and Mara Conrad were there, too, so it was like old home week. After the Cinnamon Brown night when I’d first met Mara, we had seen them often, always with a lot of laughs. Mara loved antique-clothing shops and thrift stores, as I did, and we spent a lot of fun times sifting through bins of old sweaters looking for cashmere and rifling racks of chiffon evening dresses from the fifties.

  Norman, me, and Don King in the Philippines.

  Mara came up to me in the lobby and said, “See that woman over there?” She pointed to a knockout blonde who was nestled in a good-looking man’s arms. “That guy wrapped around her is her husband, who’s in Frazier’s camp, and he’s been here all week screwing everything that’s warm and moving. His wife just arrived today, and as she came in, she announced, ‘The main event is here! You can forget all about the preliminaries!’” Apparently they had a great marriage, and she knew about the other women but didn’t care. I told Norman the story an
d he loved it. “That’s the kind of woman who really loves her man,” he said. I was appalled.

  “What are you saying? That’s the kind of man who doesn’t love his woman!” It really bothered me that he admired that kind of behavior. “You’d never do that to me, would you?”

  “No, of course not!” He changed his tune fast. “If I’m going to be with you, I’m going to be true to you. I mean it.” He was so sincere, those blue eyes piercing right into me. I believed him. Even though he had a track record six miles long, I really thought we had too much going between us for him to risk ruining it. He wanted to change. He sincerely wanted me, just me, he kept telling me over and over. I was twenty-six and I would be young and sexy forever. Well, at least I would forever be twenty-six years younger than him.

  The days were backward to the time in New York—midnight was at noon—and we slept all day and stayed up all night. Ali and Frazier trained all night, as it was better they worked on the schedule their bodies were used to. We didn’t even try to change our schedules. We just found new ways to amuse ourselves all night. Norman got hold of some body paint and painted my body like a weird Helmut Newton African tattooed woman or something, and took pictures. Then I painted him, and finally we had the fun of washing it off in the shower. We were like two naughty kids, up all night playing, but we still managed to get up during the day and do a few tourist things as well.