Norman had to ride in to the office in Eur every day, but at least I didn’t have to deal with cabs and trying to find my way in and out of the city. I spent my days walking the streets (avoiding small empty backstreets), loving the big piazzas with fountains everywhere and pigeons cheekily hopping around, blanketing the ground. There were other kinds of cheeky animals, too, called easy boys, handsome young men who would come up to you and begin speaking in English. If you didn’t answer, they started in French, then Spanish, and finally German. They knew a smattering of everything, and their aim was to pick up young (or not so young, but rich) women tourists and get what they could from them. I was pretty adept at sloughing them off, but once a rather young one I had just rejected reached out and grabbed my breast. I had a flashback to the time I was raped and was so outraged that as he turned to leave, I gave him a hard kick in the pants. It was a stupid thing to do. He could have turned and attacked me, but instead he ran away, and that made me feel good, like I wasn’t just a helpless woman.
Another time, a handsome older (probably thirty-five) man struck up a conversation with me, and was highly insulted when I said I wasn’t interested in easy boys, that I was there with my boyfriend. He said “I am no easy boy. I own a boutique. Come, I’ll show you.” And he grabbed my hand and started walking fast down the street. I was a little frightened, not sure what he was up to, but the streets were full of people, and a couple of blocks down, he turned into a delightful little boutique where he was greeted as the owner. I spent a nice hour trying on clothes and bought a couple of dresses. Come to think of it, even though I didn’t go out to dinner with him, he accomplished the same thing as if he had been an easy boy, didn’t he? He made some money off me.
Right beside the hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps was a beauty shop called the Femme Sistina. I passed the window every day, and one day I saw a lipstick in the display that I liked and went in to buy it. The shop was owned by a charming woman named Lisette Linzi Terracina, who asked me if I had ever done any modeling. I said no, but that I really wanted to, and was in fact going to try to do that when I got back to New York.
“Would you like to do some pictures for us?” she asked. “It would be in an Italian magazine for salons. You have wonderful hair.” I was so flattered that of course I said yes, and the next day I went to a studio with Lisette and posed for a whole afternoon while the stylist did several different hairdos on me. The pictures were good, and Norman, proud of me, took them to show to Sergio. Leone laid them out on his desk in a row and studied them for a while. Then he grunted, shuffled them into a stack, and put them into his desk drawer. Norman was horrified.
“Wait a minute, Sergio. I can’t let you have those,” he said. “Barbara needs those to show to Wilhelmina when she gets back to New York. They are for her work.” Leone either pretended he didn’t understand or he really didn’t, but either way, he wasn’t giving back the pictures. Norman went and got the translator, who finally got across to Leone that the pictures were not meant as a gift to him. He gave them back with ill grace. Norman said that at that moment, he felt something shift in the relationship.
Norman had been working steadily on the screenplay, which had turned into two movies, the original one and the sequel. Then, ugly items started appearing in the press. Someone reported that Norman Mailer had brought an eighteen-year-old girl (!) to Rome and was holed up with her in his room, ordering in room service and writing the script on toilet paper. It was laughable, but people took it seriously. His friend Mickey Knox was incensed. He and Norman’s secretary were prepared to testify that Norman worked at the studio every day, everyone knew that. What could this all be about?
Modeling for the Femme Sistina.
Soon Norman got word that Leone was unhappy with the script, and he was canceling the deal. The script hadn’t been translated, so there was no way Leone could have even read it, but it must have been the producer who didn’t like it, and they were not going to pay. Mickey said that Leone did movies for children, and he didn’t know how to handle a sophisticated script in well-written, full-bodied English like this one. There was hardly any dialogue at all in Leone’s westerns, so I could see the problem. Our month in Rome, so wonderful in so many ways, turned into a nightmare.
Norman’s contract clearly stated that he would get paid for the script whether or not it was made into a movie, but Leone was determined not to pay him at all. He said the script was useless. We came back to New York and sent it to Peter Bogdanovich and Billy Friedkin, two top directors at the time, both of whom liked it. In fact, Friedkin wanted to make the movie, and tried to buy the script, but Leone wouldn’t sell. Nor would he make the movie, and he wouldn’t pay. Norman sued for his money, about seventy-five thousand dollars. Leone called Mickey and tried to get him to testify against Norman, and Mickey went crazy. He told Leone in no uncertain terms that he would never lie about his best friend, and that Sergio should pay Norman what he owed him.
The lawsuit dragged on for a few years, and finally Leone was ordered to pay, but by then the money had been mostly eaten up in lawyers’ fees, so the only thing we got was the professional satisfaction that Norman had, indeed, written a good script. Leone went on to get another screenwriter—several other writers, actually—and made the movie using the same title, Once Upon a Time in America, with Robert De Niro. We never did know exactly why Leone had such a drastic change of heart. I can’t believe it was because he couldn’t have my hairdo pictures, but Norman was always convinced that was the turning point. He said there was something in his eyes as he handed back the pictures that said, “You’ll be sorry.”
Twenty-three
We got back to New York just before Thanksgiving, and true to his word to Carol, Norman spent it in Stockbridge and I went to Lady Jeanne Campbell’s for dinner. She cooked a lovely, if not exactly traditional, dinner of turkey and little rubber dumplings called spaetzle. Jeannie was famous for not being much of a cook, but she did everything with such panache that you didn’t care how it tasted. She had indeed invited several single men, but none of them offered Norman any competition, and the people at the dinner who were the most interesting to me were her daughters, Kate and Cusi.
They had a nanny who used to be a homeless person. She’d taken up residence on the steps outside Jeannie’s door on Seventy-second Street, and every time Jeanne went in or out, the woman said, “Good morning, Lady Jeanne,” or “Good evening, Lady Jeanne.” One day Jeanne noticed the woman had numbers tattooed on her arm, obviously from a concentration camp. Jeannie couldn’t help herself, she invited her in and somehow she stayed. The poor woman resided in fantasyland part of the time, but she loved the girls and for the most part was harmless, if rather ineffectual. Jeannie was like that, always trying to help someone.
After Thanksgiving, Norman came back from Stockbridge, and Christmas suddenly exploded everywhere. The windows of New York’s fanciest department stores were a fairyland of inventive displays, one more clever than the last. Ropes were set up outside Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, and Saks to keep the lookers in line. I went into FAO Schwarz and vowed that the first thing I would do when Matthew got up here was take him there and let him get any toy he wanted. He was going to love New York so much! I couldn’t wait to bring him up here, which we were planning to do before Christmas.
I called Amy and showed her the pictures. She said that with those Milton had taken, I had enough good ones, and she called Wilhelmina. Amy said Willie could tell from these that I was model material, and she was pretty sure she would take me on. I wasn’t so sure. The letter I had gotten from Eileen Ford all those years before, in 1968, the one that said I should pursue another career, still haunted me. I hadn’t told anyone back home at the time that I had even written to Eileen Ford, and it was a good thing. It would have been pretty embarrassing if they knew I had been turned down flat. Larry would have been upset because it had been a last-ditch attempt to have a life other than marriage and living in Atkins, and I though
t I had blown it forever, but here I was, at twenty-six, trying again.
Wilhelmina was a beauty from the Netherlands and had an exotic accent that had been cured in years of cigarette smoke until her voice was textured like suede. She had deep brown eyes and chestnut hair, was wearing a black turtleneck and black slacks, and had a pair of little half-moon glasses on her forehead when I walked in. I handed her my envelope of pictures and stood waiting while she positioned her glasses onto her nose and looked at them.
“How tall are you?” she said, looking up from the pictures.
“Five feet ten.”
“No. You can’t be. Step closer to the desk.” I did. “Well, if you’re not, you’re close.” What an eye! I wasn’t really five ten. I was five nine and three-quarters, but I’d always rounded it up for good measure.
“How old are you?” This was the part I dreaded. They didn’t take girls older than twenty-three, and I would have to lie.
“I’m twenty-three.” I had the look of guilt on my face, and was ready to walk out if she asked to see my driver’s license, but she only nodded, studying the photos.
“Your hair’s too red. We’ll have to dye it brown. Redheads don’t sell.” That was a shock. I thought my red hair was my biggest asset. I didn’t know what to say. I most certainly didn’t want to dye my hair brown and be like every other girl on the street, but I didn’t want to walk out the door, either.
“Could we wait a little bit on that?” I said. “I really like my red hair, and maybe it will sell. Surely there are other redheads that make money, aren’t there?” She looked at me for another long moment.
“Well, you at least need to get a good haircut. There’s too much of it. It’s too long and shapeless. I’ll call Pierre at Pierre Michel. You go over there right now and tell him… tell him… oh, hell, tell him you’re with us.”
I wanted to grab her and hug her but she was not the kind of woman who invited strangers to hug. I’d never been scared by a woman before in my life, but I was close to it with Willie. She stuck my pictures back into the envelope and handed them to me. “Go back and talk to Kay, get all the paperwork done, then go see Pierre. He’s on Fifty-seventh Street. He’ll be waiting for you.” She handed me a piece of paper with the address on it.
I went back and talked to Kay, a heavyset young woman with a beautiful face, and got all the paperwork done. Then I went down the elevator and ran as fast as I could up Fifth Avenue toward Fifty-seventh Street. The Christmas lights had never looked so bright, the air was clean and cold, and everyone on the street smiled at me when I told them “I’ve just been taken by Wilhelmina!” I couldn’t help it. I wanted everyone to know.
Pierre was French, young, and handsome, and made me feel like I was part of a special club. I didn’t know what kind of haircut Willie wanted for me, and frankly I didn’t want a haircut at all. I had spent two years growing my hair out from a bad short haircut, and I liked it long. I thought long would be more versatile, but apparently not.
“Willie suggested that I should give you a wedge, like Shaun Casey has,” Pierre said, holding up a picture of a girl I had seen in Wilhelmina’s. She was on the cover of Glamour. I hated her hair. It was pouffy on top and layered short in the neckline, like a mushroom. It would look stupid on me. My head was too small and this would make it look like a peanut in a Beatle wig. My face must have shown how disappointed I was.
“Uh, Pierre, could we keep it just a little bit longer? I don’t think I look so good in short hair.”
“Okay. I’ll just do layers around your face, some bangs, and not too short in the back.” He went to work, and when he was done, it was a lot shorter than I thought it would be, just a tad longer than a mushroom. It was about chin length, and the ends stuck out all over the place. The top was layered. I really didn’t like it at all. But what did I know? It was chic—at least he said it was—and I would have to learn what was chic and what was not. I went back to the agency. Wilhelmina liked the haircut, and thank God didn’t say anything else about dyeing it brown. There was only one other little thing we needed to discuss. “So, what name do you think you’d like to use?” she asked. I was a little surprised.
“I guess Barbara Norris. That’s my name.”
“Yes, but that seems so… ordinary somehow. We need a name that people will remember, something that is catchy and exotic. Not so girl-next-door and old-fashioned.”
“Well, when I paint, I sign my paintings with just the name Norris. Maybe I could use that.” I actually liked the way it looked in paint, which was why I did it. Barbara was harder to paint with a brush.
“Norris. Norris. That’s good. Yes, like Twiggy or Apollonia or Pope. Models with only one name are big right now. Okay. Norris. We’ll try that.”
She then introduced me to my booker, who would be the person making all my appointments for me, a girl named Gara. I was to call her several times a day, since new things came in all the time. Gara would be my den mother, the one who would help me get started, the one who answered all my questions. At this point I didn’t even know enough to know what the questions were. I wanted her to like me, and I think for the most part she did. She gave me a chart that showed the numbers and cross streets of Manhattan, and she made a few appointments for the next day. Then she helped me put my pictures into a temporary book, a brown plastic binder that said Wilhelmina on the cover, and she gave me a brown faux leather appointment book, which also had the Wilhelmina logo inside. I would later get a nice leather portfolio with a shoulder strap that I carried to appointments, the book that told everyone on the street that I was a model. I was excited and scared all at the same time.
Norman was thrilled when I got home and told him all about it. His Henry Higgins strategy was paying off. He liked the idea of the name change. He was always big on funny nicknames. If I did something stupid or clumsy like, say, slip on a banana peel, he would say, “I’m going to call you Slipsy from now on. Slipsy McNorris, how ya doin’?” Or whatever it would be for the moment. He never remembered the nicknames more than a few minutes, and there was always a new one for every occasion. He had funny pet names for the girls, too. Maggie was Magatroid Magoonspoons, Sue was Susu McGoosoo, Danielle was Goosey Patako, and Betsy was Fats Svengado. Kate was Katie Katoosh. He loved playing with names and words, and spouted silly doggerel and bad wordplay jokes that made us all laugh. He loved limericks. (There was a young lady named Alice… Uh, you’ve probably heard that one.) He even wrote a nonsense poem called “Cousins” that was included in a book called Wonders, and I did a little illustration for it.
My favorite things he did, which went on for many years, were the twat poems. Every morning when we woke up, he would sing a version of the same silly little song, sort of to the tune of “Bill” from Show Boat. It started out “She’s just my twat…” and then he went on with some kind of funny verse that always ended with “She’s just my twat. I love her an awful lot.” So we started our days with giggles.
I didn’t mind that Wilhelmina wanted me to change my name, but I told Norman, “If I use just the one name, Norris, for my modeling name, that’s great. But I think I need a second name. A person can’t go through life with just one name. What about driver’s licenses and stuff? I can’t use the name Davis. There’s too many s’s: Norrissss Davissss. Not good.” He thought about it.
“How about Church? You’re a good Christian; you spent half your life in church. It’s a solid English name, and that’s where your family is from. How about Norris Church?”
And that was it, with about that much thought put into it. So I began to use my ex-husband’s last name for my first name, which was weird, to say the least. I called Larry and asked if he minded, and he didn’t mind at all. I think he rather liked the fact I was going to use his name. It would prove to be even more weird down the road, when I took Norman’s name after we were married. I realized that my identity was composed of my two husbands’ names with me nowhere in it, but by then it was too late. (Plus, Nor
ris is usually a man’s name, and that has caused endless confusion. Once someone looked me straight in the face and called me Mr. Mailer. I said, “Do I look like a man to you?” He was befuddled and nervously apologized, but somehow it was easier for him to call me Mr. than to wrap his head around the fact that Norris was a woman. What an idiot.) If I had it to do over, I would be Barbara Davis, then Barbara Mailer, no matter how boring the fashion world thought it was, but now it’s too late.
Twenty-four
Just before Christmas, we went to Arkansas to get Matt. Norman called Fig and asked if we could stay with them because my parents wouldn’t let us sleep in the same bed, and Norman wasn’t about to sleep on the couch. Fig and Ecey were still a little sore that we had deceived them and sneaked off together, as they saw it, but they said yes. What else could they do? I dreaded confronting my parents, but it turned out they were so happy to see me that nothing else mattered. They met us at the airport, and Matthew came running up to me and hugged my legs. “I knew you would come to get me!” he said. Poor little guy. I’m sure there were moments when he wasn’t sure I was going to come back, but we were together again, and he stuck to me like a cocklebur all the way home in the car.
Norman was cordial to my parents, as they were to him. He told them we were in love and were going to be married when he could get his personal life straightened out, but it was complicated. I’m not sure if they knew exactly what the complicated personal life entailed, and he didn’t go into details, but they knew he was married and had seven children.
A Ticket to the Circus Page 19