A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  The summer brought us all closer together, in spite of the lateness of my and Matt’s arrival and the fact that the house was in a salt marsh and the drains smelled vaguely like baby urp. The girls accepted me as something between a girlfriend and an older sister. We all shopped and cooked, did mountains of laundry, and took care of the smaller kids. Michael and Stephen were normal rowdy boys who half loved me and half were wary of me, now that I was a figure of authority. The kids really knew after that summer that the guard had changed.

  I met Carol for the first time the week I arrived in Wellfleet. She had rented a house down the road to be near Maggie. I was watching out the window as she drove up into the yard and got out of the car. I was nervous. Norman talked about her constantly, and she had achieved epic status in my imagination. I knew she was a great beauty from seeing her pictures. I wanted to look good, but not as if I were trying too hard, so after changing outfits several times, I finally put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and some big earrings.

  She was as beautiful as I had imagined, wearing a low-cut silk top and pants (I remember a lot of cleavage, something I didn’t have much of), and sandals, with shimmery toenail polish. Her skin was tanned to a dark bronze, which made me envious, as I never got a tan. My milky skin only burned and got freckles. She was wearing copper eye shadow, the same color as her toenails, and looked alarmingly like Elizabeth Taylor. I’m not sure what she thought of me, but we hugged and said, “Oh, you’re so beautiful!” over and over, and we both meant it. Of course, there was tension (how could there not be?), and for years we were jealous of each other, but with the passing years, we have somehow become friends. I wish we could have been friends from the beginning. It would have made things so much easier on Maggie, but that was not in the cards.

  Carol.

  It’s funny now to compare notes and realize how our relationships with Norman paralleled, how he had done the same things to each of us, told the same jokes, made the same comments. One of his little tricks was to come up to Carol at a party where she was talking to a handsome man and whisper in her ear, “You’ve lost your looks,” hoping to throw her off in case she was enjoying herself too much. I’m not sure how she reacted, but he did the exact same thing to me. I just said, “Yeah, thanks, pal. I’ll work on it,” and I’d go on talking. I used to tease him that the reason he got married so many times was that he kept running out of stories and jokes, and had to keep getting a fresh audience. Maybe there’s more truth than poetry in that.

  When we got back to New York from the summer, I managed, with the help of Chuck Neighbors, to get Cosmopolitan magazine to print a story I had written about my experiences of becoming a model. It was called “Getting My Book Together.” I wanted Francesco Scavullo, who did all the covers for Cosmo, to do my picture for the article, and they agreed. They even let me do a cover try. I went up to Scavullo’s studio wearing a pair of khaki blouson pants and a white shirt, with a pair of L.L.Bean rubber and leather boots—don’t ask me why, I thought it was terribly chic—and he did pictures of me in that outfit first. Then Way Bandy, who was the top makeup man in New York at the time, did my makeup, and Harry King, a famous hairdresser, did my hair. I felt like one of the big girls. I wore a pink silk low-cut top with skinny pants. I apologized for my flat chest, but they said, “Don’t worry about it, Norris. They’ll airbrush some boobs on. Never fear.” I didn’t make the cover because Helen Gurley Brown said my hair was too short. I gnashed my teeth over my lost long hair, but there was nothing to do about it.

  Wilhelmina loved the piece and for many years had it photocopied and handed to every new girl who came in, along with her street guide.

  THE WINTER OF ’76–’77 was a particularly snowy one, and I didn’t have a warm coat. I’d left all my coats, which weren’t heavy, behind in Arkansas, and the winter before, I’d made do with a black velvet coat with a fur collar I’d gotten in a vintage clothing store in the Village on Bleecker Street for twenty-five dollars. While it was striking for evening, it wasn’t warm. I’d also gotten a purple wool cape in Italy, which was dramatic but not warm enough for the deep cold. Then I ran across some old pictures of Carol and Norman, and she was wearing a fur coat, a gray fox or whatever, and I got green-eyed fur lust. But how to broach the subject with Norman? I couldn’t let him know how jealous of her I was, and I hated to ask him for money. He had started having his secretary send me a check for a hundred dollars every week, which paid the rent and a few extras, but I wasn’t making enough at modeling to really fill in the gaps. It was tricky. I couldn’t ask him for a fur coat head-on, but one night when we were out in a snowstorm, he put his arm around me and felt me shiver. “Is that the warmest coat you have?” he said. I said yes, but maybe I could find a warmer one at a vintage store or something. He took a look at the purple cape, like he’d never seen it, which was entirely possible, given his obliviousness to his environment. “We have to get you something warmer than that!”

  “How much would a fur coat cost?” I asked. “Not that I’d need to have a fur coat, but they’re really warm. Maybe I could get a secondhand one or something. I’ll look around.” Oh, I was so crafty!

  I saw the wheels begin turning in his head. It would never occur to him on his own to get me a fur coat, but once an idea got into his head, he did it up in a big way. He asked one of his friends, who knew someone whose uncle or cousin or whatever was a furrier in the Garment District, and found we could get one wholesale. Norman said he would take me down there and just look and see what they had, no promises. I modeled in the Ben Kahn fur ads for The New York Times, and I knew a coat like those would be way beyond my wildest dreams, but I was sure we could find something reasonable for wholesale.

  The place was called D’Cor and was run by a guy named Buddy. His assistant was a woman named Rita, who wore too much eye makeup, but then so did I, and we liked each other immediately. She started off showing us the cheaper furs like rabbit and raccoon, none of which Norman liked at all. I tried on a mink, which he didn’t like, either. Too plain. Then he saw a coat across the room. “What’s that one?” he said. We’d told Rita we didn’t want one that was too expensive, but the one he was looking at was a full-length red fox. Rita winked at me and went and pulled it off the hanger. I put it on, and it was like a slot machine in Las Vegas had gone off. With my red hair, it was perfect. Norman was so transparent. I could see him thinking of me wearing that coat and nothing else. I could see it, too. I didn’t dare hope he would go for it, so I didn’t carry on too much, but after I tried on a few others, he said, “No, that’s the one we want. I’m not going to have you walk into a place in a drab ugly coat. It has to be the fox.” And he got it. I could hardly breathe, I was so excited. They were going to take a couple of days to embroider my initials “NC” into the coat’s champagne-colored lining, and then it would be all mine.

  When I finally brought it home, the first thing I did was put it on with nothing else underneath. Needless to say, it was a huge hit. He loved sweeping into places with me in that coat and tall high heels. There was a picture of us in Playboy at a party at Studio 54 with me wearing that coat when I was nearly nine months pregnant. There were pictures in all the social columns of me in the coat. I wore it everywhere. I hated to take it off. I had that coat for thirty years, and it was worth every penny he paid. I’m sure he would agree.

  Several years later, during the period when furs were getting splashed with red paint by crazy nuts, I was a little nervous. It was such a spectacular target, and sure enough, one night as I was standing in the street, my mind somewhere else, waiting for the light to change, someone came up behind me in a car and slowly and carefully ran into me. The heel of my shoe got crunched under the tire, and it was a wonder I didn’t fall and really get hurt. I was in such a rage that I yelled and screamed at the people in the car, who just laughed as they got out. I’m not sure if they were fur nuts or just nuts. If there had been a cop around, I would have called him, but I was also a little afraid of
them. There’s a fine line for a woman alone between standing up for herself and being foolhardy. It did take some of the bloom off the coat, though, and even if I hadn’t been a fur nut target, I felt like a target of some kind. Besides, it was beginning to show its age. The elbows were nearly bare and it was becoming shabby, so I finally had to put it away, but I still have the shreds hanging in the closet. I can’t part with them.

  (P.S. One Christmas when I was about thirty-two, I had Robert Belott shoot nude photographs of me in the coat, and I gave an album of them to Norman for a Christmas gift. He said it was the best present he had ever received. They were classic Victorian sepia nudes, not pornographic by any means. I totally trusted Robert. He was my favorite photographer and a dear friend, and I told him that no one—no one—else was to see these pictures, not even his assistant. He swore.

  In the red fox, with the naughty bits blocked out.

  Then one day several months later, my downstairs neighbor, who was in advertising, called and asked if I knew there were nude photographs of me being circulated in some photographer’s book. I called Robert, got quite loud, and reluctantly he promised to take them out. “They’re just too good to not let people see them,” was his argument. “You can’t ask Picasso to put his work in the closet!” He was frustrated. Still, I think he took the pictures out of his portfolio.

  Years and years went by, and we kept in touch. Robert left photography and opened a bed-and-breakfast in Florida called the Cypress. Recently, a remark dropped in a conversation with a mutual friend let me know that my nude pictures had graced the bar of the Cypress for many years. Actually, at this point, I don’t mind. It’s kind of flattering, being the nude girl above the bar. I told my daughter-in-law Sasha, Michael’s wife, who is a gorgeous singer, that she should get some done while she is still young enough. When you are old and wrinkled, you will always have those pictures to remind you that once upon a time, you were a hot naked babe in a red fox coat.)

  Twenty-seven

  I think of that winter of ’76–’77 as our first real year together. We had become closer than ever, the family had accepted Matt and me, and our life was coalescing. After our big party for Dick and Doris Goodwin, where we more or less came out to society as a couple, we started being invited to a lot of dinner parties and social functions. I was beginning to learn about fashion—being in it all day, of course—but I still didn’t have much of a wardrobe. I had no evening dresses at all, and a lot of the functions we were invited to were black tie. I made do with a few things I’d gotten in my favorite vintage store called Fonda’s, on Lexington Avenue in the thirties, a long black Scott Barrie skirt with different tops, mostly, and I managed to kind of pull it off, chiefly because I was young and skinny, but it was catching up to me. We were in a social set that wore couture and designer, and while I couldn’t afford that, I didn’t want to look like some down-at-the-heels hick, and Norman didn’t want me to, either. One of his pleasures was to walk into a party with me looking glamorous in the coat, but I couldn’t wear the coat all the time.

  Then one night we were invited to Oscar de la Renta’s house for a small dinner. He had also invited Sam Walton, of Walmart, which hadn’t yet become the behemoth it is today but was already getting well known, and I supposed they wanted us in part because I was from Arkansas. Oscar was my favorite designer in the world, and I was a wreck over what to wear. I went to Bloomingdale’s and searched through the evening dresses, but everything was way too expensive. Anything designed by Oscar himself was totally out of the question. Then, wandering through the lingerie section, I came across an ivory satin gown with a filmy silk jacket, like Jean Harlow might have worn, and it wasn’t too expensive, so I got it. I figured with a long strand of fake pearls and glitzy earrings and the red fox coat I could pull it off. My hair had grown back a bit by this time and was pretty glamorous. So off we went to Oscar de la Renta’s house for dinner. Oscar’s chic French wife, Françoise, took my coat and said how beautiful it was, and then there I was, left in my nightgown. I hadn’t even worn a bra or pantyhose because of the lines.

  They indeed had seated me next to Sam Walton, who was nice and so down-home. We liked each other immediately, and talked about how nobody in the North could understand us, and how stupid some of the people were. I told him of talking to the headmaster of a private school for fifteen minutes about my work as an art teacher, the problems of education and whatever, until finally the headmaster had asked me where I’d taught, and I’d said “Arkansas.” “They have art in Arkansas?” He’d been incredulous. Sam laughed. He could relate. People always underestimated him, which was sometimes to the good. In fact, he cultivated it. He drove the same old pickup truck he had driven for years, and could talk bird dog with the best of them. We had the best time talking about Arkansas, just like Oscar and Françoise knew we would. Norman, of course, was always the center of attention at any dinner party. He came alive at the table much like he did onstage, and for years we were invited everywhere just for the entertainment value.

  The de la Renta house had lush velvet and gold and embroidered cushions and furniture everywhere, Oriental carpets, luminous paintings of Arab sheiks and desert tents full of pillows and carpets and couches, not unlike the ones in the room below the paintings. I felt like I was in Morocco or Zanzibar or somewhere hot and sandy and exotic, only without the heat and the sand. Oscar had a soft accent and brown eyes that melted every woman into a puddle. He and Françoise couldn’t have been more gracious to Norman and me.

  At the end of the evening, Françoise took me aside and whispered into my ear, “My dahling, we have to get you some clothes. Call me tomorrow and we’ll go to Oscar’s showroom and pick out some things. You can fit the runway samples. It will not be expensive.” She did it in a way that didn’t humiliate me, and I always loved her for that. I did call and go with her the next day to the showroom, and it was a wonderland of the most beautiful clothing I could imagine. Norman had told me to get anything I wanted within reason. He knew I needed things for the life we were beginning to lead, and so I came back with a huge bag of runway samples. I still have a lot of them, and regret the ones I gave away over time. Twice a year I would call Françoise, and then Boaz Mazor, Oscar’s assistant, and get a few new things for the coming season. I was still struggling to find my “look,” as Wilhelmina said, but I was getting closer. At least I knew better than to go out in a nightgown again.

  Twenty-eight

  I did a go-see for a Mexican TV commercial for Raleigh cigarettes, and was astounded when I got it. I think Wilhelmina was, too, but it was good news for me, as I wasn’t making that much and it was a small windfall. I’d never been to Mexico, although Norman’s oldest daughter, Susan, lived there. I thought I’d get to see her, but unfortunately she was in New York while I was down there and we missed each other. Norman used to spend quite a bit of time in Mexico when Sue was small. He sometimes stayed for weeks, and told me lots of stories of his time down there.

  One story I love is of when Sue was driving back with him and his second wife, Adele, to New York when she was about three or four, and for some reason she started talking about angels, los ángeles. Norman, who was then trying to be a staunch atheist, said there were no such things as angels. “Can you see angels, Sue? Do you hear them?” “No,” she had to admit. “Well, then, if you can’t see them or hear them, there aren’t any angels. They don’t exist. It’s like a fairy tale.” Sue was crestfallen. After a few minutes of deep thought, she said, “Papa, Grandma exists, doesn’t she? We can’t see her or hear her, but she lives in New York. So maybe los ángeles are real, but just live in heaven.” It gave him pause, and that may have been one of the first cracks in his atheistic beliefs. Another crack came from author James Jones, who believed in reincarnation. Jim said it was the only thing that made sense to him, and Norman finally had to agree. He certainly had done a complete turnaround and firmly believed in God when I met him.

  MY PLANE CIRCLED Mexico City, which w
as obliterated in soft gray fog. It lies in the bottom of a bowl, with mountains all around, and the pollution was bad. In fact, when Sue got pregnant with her first daughter, Valentina, she and her husband, Marco, moved to Chile to escape the smog. It was indeed a little hard to breathe sometimes, and if I stood looking down the street, everything got hazy after a block or two and then became gray. But the excitement of being in a commercial outweighed anything else. Cigarette commercials were not done in the United States, but Mexico didn’t care. There was already so much pollution that smoking a cigarette was like taking a breath of ordinary air.

  The first afternoon was devoted to getting fake fingernails. In those days, the way they did it was to mix up a powder and goop it over forms on each fingertip. The forms had to dry, then the nails were filed and shaped to the correct length. It took hours. In this case, the correct length was about two inches long. I had never had real nails in my life. I kept them clipped short, being a painter and working in clay and other art materials, so I wasn’t used to them at all. It was sort of glamorous at first, having these long red talons, but after I left the salon, I realized how helpless I was. I couldn’t push elevator buttons. I couldn’t dial the phone. I couldn’t button my blouse. I tried to pick my nose and nearly slit my nostril. Washing my hair was problematic, too, and by the time morning arrived I was going a little nuts with them. I had small nicks where I’d tried to scratch in my sleep, and it is a miracle I didn’t put my eye out.