A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  After that debacle, I tried to help him as much as I could. I took over paying the bills and other minutiae of running his life, a lot of which I was already doing—which might have been part of the problem with Molly. But the new Gilmore project, which he was calling The Executioner’s Song, was too vast and he needed a full-time secretary and research assistant badly. He put a blind item in The Village Voice, “Well-known author seeks amanuensis.”

  “That’ll weed out half of the people who have no idea what an amanuensis is, and the others will either look it up, which is good, or will already know, which is better.” He received a big stack of résumés from The Village Voice post office box, we weeded them down to about ten or twelve, and called the finalists, who came in for interviews. A couple of them were possibilities, most were marginal, and one was simply unbelievable. She was a hefty blonde (a color found nowhere in nature) and she came for the interview wearing a low-cut short skin-tight black dress with black fishnet stockings and red spike-heeled shoes. This was just before Christmas, and I was already pretty big in the belly. I answered the doorbell, took one look at her, she looked at me, and she knew she had done the wrong thing. The interview didn’t last long, that’s for sure. Then, when we were about to despair, Judith McNally rang the bell. She was wearing a tidy gray wool suit with a little robin’s-egg-blue blouse. Her long brown hair was pulled back into a bun. She was smart and thin and as crisp as a new package of crackers. And she lived only two blocks from us. She was perfect.

  So the household was formed. In the daytime, Judith worked down in the little office on the floor below our apartment, Norman rented a studio down the street, and Myrtle was with us most days. Michael, Stephen, and Matt were in school, so it was quiet during the day, but at night it was chaos. The situation with Michael and Stephen wasn’t improving, and I couldn’t seem to get through to them. Norman didn’t back me up at all. In fact, he was annoyed that I couldn’t handle them, and blamed me for their misbehavior. It got to the point where something had to give.

  I’ve always been able to express myself better in writing, and it seemed like nothing I said to Michael and Stephen had any effect, so I wrote them a heartfelt letter, asking them to be kinder to Matt and telling them how much I loved them and what good big brothers they could be to him if they only tried. I said they should try to look at it from his point of view. He had been taken from his home when he was three, where he’d been an only child, and brought to a place where he was one of eight children and his two older brothers teased him mercilessly. He was teased at school because he was dyslexic, and then teased at home. He was miserable, and I couldn’t do anything to protect him.

  I really think the letter helped. They hadn’t seen themselves as being that bad, and to their credit they felt awful. Norman certainly thought the letter helped. Although nothing could dampen their energy and exuberance, I think they were kinder to Matt after that and stopped teasing him quite so much.

  The trapeze hanging from the skylight rafter was one huge problem, though. It was right in front of the kitchen, and one boy or the other was always swinging through the house on it. I had to time my entrances and exits to the kitchen so I wouldn’t be crashed into by a flying boy. Then one day, as Stephen was standing up on the trapeze bar in his socks, pumping, flying higher and wilder, he slipped off and flew into the air for real, crashed, and went skidding all the way across the living room floor. I dropped a cup of tea I was holding and ran to him, but he was fine, just shaken and bruised a bit.

  Shortly after that, one of the ropes on the trapeze broke, fortunately not while someone was standing up on it. We never put it back up again. The tightrope had long been put away. And the rule about no friends jumping into the hammock was strictly enforced. It was just too dangerous. Finally, Beverly moved from Provincetown to Brooklyn Heights, a block away from us, and Stephen lived with her most of the time. Then Michael eventually went to Andover to boarding school. Now Michael and Stephen are my dearest loves and I don’t know what I would do without them. Michael even produced Matt’s first film, The Money Shot, and they have great affection for each other.

  Matt on the trapeze.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY JILL KREMENTZ

  “Matt is so talented,” Michael said while they were filming. “He’s a great filmmaker.”

  “Mike’s always there for me. He’s a great producer,” Matt said.

  “Who are these people?” I said. Everyone is a teenager once, and everyone grows up.

  Judith had been on the job just a few weeks when she came in one morning looking considerably different. We had slowly been getting to know each other, and I like to think there’s nobody I can’t talk to, from hillbillies to presidents, but she was hard to decipher. She was intensely private about her life, and while she did say she was single and lived alone, she had a boyfriend. Her usual office attire was something a little drab and colorless. Her hair had been a wren’s-nest-brown, and she wore no makeup on her pale Irish skin. She was efficient and did her work with the minimum of talk, and while they weren’t buddies, Norman had respect for her, and they were beginning to find their relationship.

  I don’t know what possessed her to make the change on this particular morning, but I sat up in my chair and almost spit out my coffee, because in walked Judith, with her long hair dyed a brilliant shade of red, best described as “carnevale,” and she was wearing Day-Glo pink spandex pants and a tight sequined T-shirt. She had painted her long fake nails a neon green, and her makeup matched the ensemble.

  “Judith? Is that you?” Norman came out of the kitchen to stare, too.

  “Well, I thought it was time to let you see the real me. I’ve started managing my boyfriend’s group, and I’ve had to start looking the part.” It was hilarious to hear Judith’s precise, tidy voice coming out of the woman standing in front of us. Her boyfriend was in a duo that performed in punk rock clubs, and she had become part of that world. I can’t remember if it was Judith who introduced us to Legs McNeil, a writer who started a magazine called PUNK, and coined the term for the music of the eighties. It might have been Martha Thomasas, another applicant for the secretarial job, whom Norman hired on a part-time basis for research, but we were soon introduced to a different kind of crowd.

  Martha took us to CBGB’s to hear Shrapnel, a band that Legs was friendly with, and the Ramones, whom nobody at that time except the hip underground crowd had heard of. On the night we went to CBGB’s we wound up going back to the Ramones’ apartment after the show and hanging out with them for a while. They were knocked out that Norman Mailer was there, and we were knocked out that we were there, too. The music was so loud that even with earplugs in our ears it was painful, and hanging out with them involved watching them drink and get stoned while we tried to have a conversation with them. Still, it was kind of fun to be able to say, “Oh, yes, I used to hang out with the Ramones.”

  When Sue and Marco got married a year or two later, we had Shrapnel come and perform at the party we gave. They were set up on the balcony above the kitchen and had a girl singer named Joey with them who was lovely but pallid; her hair was orange and her skin was the color of buttermilk. Her teeth were in need of attention. Her hands shook. I had a bad feeling about her, and with sorrow I heard that she overdosed some time after that.

  Ultimately, Judith and the boyfriend broke up, she found one who was an executive for an envelope company, and her wardrobe went back to something a little more normal, although she kept the red hair and the fake nails. She was the most enigmatic woman I have ever met. She worked for Norman for twenty-seven years, and I don’t think I ever really knew her.

  WHEN I FIRST met Norman, he was having a feud with Gore Vidal. I’d never read Gore’s books, and didn’t know exactly why they were fighting, but his name kept coming up in stories and conversations with Norman’s friends, and in the press. Then I found an old magazine, Intellectual Digest, October 1971, with an article by Gore, and I understood Norman’s animosity. The article
was originally written for The New York Review of Books, July 22, 1971. Gore was reviewing Another Country, by a feminist writer named Eva Figes, and out of nowhere he came and smacked Norman squarely in the face. To quote from the essay: “There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression. The Miller-Mailer-Manson man (or M3 for short) has been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed.” The piece is littered with references to M3, as in, “M3 knows that women are dangerously different from men, and not as intelligent (though they have their competencies: needlework, childcare, detective stories).” Or, “Until recently, M3 was damned if a woman was going to be paid as much as he for the same job.” He quoted from Norman’s essay “The White Negro,” taking it out of context to make it seem as though Norman was advocating the murder of women.

  It was an ugly piece all around. Norman was not only enraged by the article—who, after all, wants to be compared to a crazy murderer, the most famous crazy murderer of the time?—but it also accused Norman of being anti-gay, which was astounding. “He [Norman] links homosexuality to evil. The man who gives in to his homosexual drives is consorting with the enemy.” To be unfairly accused of being anti-homosexual—by a close homosexual friend, no less—was too much. Norman had lived in Provincetown for many years. Why would he have chosen to live in a place that was the gay mecca of the East if he thought homosexuals were evil? For the final five years of his life, Norman’s assistant was gay, and a former assistant was a lesbian. Gay men have always been among our closest friends, as Gore himself once was one of Norman’s.

  After the article was published, Norman didn’t speak to Gore until they were on the Dick Cavett show together a few months later. The show turned into a fiasco because Norman confronted Gore in the greenroom before they went on camera and butted his head (Norman was a famous head-butter in those days; his skull was like concrete), and there were some ugly comments back and forth on the air. Norman tried to talk about the article Gore had written comparing him to Charles Manson, but he got sidetracked by Gore and Dick, so he never got to fully explain why he was so angry. Gore acted as if he couldn’t understand why Norman would take offense. Cavett seemed at sea as to what was happening, but he was clearly on Gore’s side, as Norman was the aggressor, looking positively wild, and the audience was on Gore’s side as well. Janet Flanner, an elderly author who was the third guest on the show, was in the middle, poor thing, seemingly afraid Norman was going to hit her when he leaned toward her to make a comment. The whole thing was jaw-droppingly bizarre, but instead of Norman being able to get across why he was so mad at Gore, he just appeared to be mad, as in “as a hatter.”

  After the debacle of the Cavett show, he vowed if he ever saw Gore again, he was going to punch him. They managed not to run into each other for six years. Then one evening while I was pregnant, we were at the home of Lally Weymouth, Katharine Graham’s daughter. I was wearing a long white maternity dress that had a draped Greek feel to it. I spotted Gore across the room and knew if Norman ran into him, there would be trouble, so I warned Norman that Gore was there. I thought he would leave the party, but instead he marched right over to Gore. They exchanged a few hot words, then Norman threw his drink in Gore’s face. That wasn’t quite enough, so he threw the glass as well. It bounced off Gore’s head, and Gore sat down and was made much over by everyone, who grouped around him on the couch as if to shield him.

  I’m not saying beaning Gore on the head with a heavy glass was something Norman should have done, I’m just saying he didn’t do it for nothing. I stood a few feet away and watched (like a tall marble statue, someone at the party later said), horrified and helpless. Was there something I could have done to stop this? I don’t think so. It had gone past any cajoling I could do. While Gore’s essay might not have caused Norman’s bad reputation with feminists, it had added gallons of fuel to the fire. We never understood why Gore had written it. The next day the incident at the party was in all the columns, and magazines such as People picked it up. Of course, we were never invited to Lally Weymouth’s again, although she later said that it probably had made her reputation as a hostess.

  Thirty-one

  The baby was due on April 17, and I had gained sixty-five pounds. I was hungry all the time, and craved things like chocolate cheesecake from a bakery on Montague Street, ice cream, and hamburgers and french fries. I had starved myself so long while modeling that I went a little crazy, eating everything I wanted. Norman said that when I swept into a room wearing one of the big evening dresses Myrtle had made for me, I looked like a frigate in full sail. During the pregnancy, we hardly slowed down at all in our social life. It seemed there was a party almost every night, and Norman wanted to go to them all.

  One night, when I was nearing my ninth month, we were at François de Menil’s, whose family had one of the biggest and best art collections in the world. The house had more art than a lot of museums, with famous works hanging in every room. The crowd included actors and writers and artists such as George Segal, who zeroed in on me, came over, and straightaway started rubbing my belly. I took a step back. I really hated it when strangers took the liberty of petting my stomach like it was a cute little dog or something, and I knew Norman would go berserk if he saw it. But to the contrary, Norman came right up and said, “There is no other man in the world I’d let feel your belly besides George.” George, of course, was the famous sculptor who did the plaster people, and I had admired him my whole teaching career. I always did a segment with my students using his techniques to make plaster masks and sometimes complete figures. (One memorable one was a man sitting on a child’s tricycle.)

  He was doing a series of pregnant women and asked me to pose for him. Naked. I wasn’t inclined to do that, as I was due to give birth soon and I didn’t like the idea of going into labor while encased in a plaster cast, not to mention the fact I was fat, but I promised I would do it later, and in fact I wound up posing for him several times. (Yes, sometimes naked. It was all totally professional, but nevertheless his wife, Helen, had timed his movements down to the second and would appear at the door just as he finished the last bit to see if we wanted tea or something. No fool, that woman.) If you’re curious, you can see me in several of his books, one showing the steps to making a finished sculpture.

  I left George talking to Norman and went poking around in the different rooms. There were several floors full of art to peruse, and I wandered into what looked like a small library. On one wall was a gigantic buffalo head. I stopped, my heart racing. I had never been close to a real buffalo before. I’d had no idea how big they were. This thing took up most of the room. Its shaggy coat was rough and soft at the same time. Its small glass eyes watched me, as if the rest of the buffalo were reclining, through a hole, on the other side of the wall in the next room. Norman and I had been trying to come up with a name for the baby, and we were seriously considering naming him Buffalo—why, I won’t tell, as it has been a secret all these years, one that only John and I now know—so seeing the buffalo head was a portent of sorts.

  As I communed with the buffalo head on the wall, a voice behind me said, “You are going to have a boy, and you are going to name him Buffalo.” I jumped and whirled around. There hadn’t been anyone in the room when I’d gone in. On the couch sat a small man, elderly, perhaps in his late seventies or more. He had longish white hair, was wearing a black three-piece suit, and his hands rested on a black gold-tipped cane. In my memory, he was wearing spats and had a bowler hat, but I think that is probably my imagination embroidering an already unbelievable scenario. I looked at him, speechless. He might have been the devil, or an angel, or a mystic, or just an old man with a wicked sense of humor and a cane. I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I had always been afraid of everything that smacked of the supernatural, my Baptist roots still dug firmly into the ground. So without speaking or looking at the buffalo head again, I walked out the door.
I didn’t see the man at the party again, not on any of the floors of the house. But his voice stayed in my head. I can hear it still.

  A few nights later, we went to a party hosted by Alice Mason, one of the biggest real estate mavens in New York. It was only two days before I was due to deliver. By that time, I was so huge I was uncomfortable, but I still put on a pair of stiletto sandals and a black-and-gold maternity dress the size of a pup tent and swept out the door. Alice was famous for her dinners. Wearing a red Galanos or some other beautiful designer dress, she and her daughter, Dominique Richard, gave a dinner every month as a thank-you to her clients, and invited interesting people. I always knew I would have a good seat at Alice’s table, and we were regulars.

  This night, it was too much to stand on those high heels during the cocktail hour, so I took my glass of ice water and sank into the couch, sighing with the effort. I put my feet up on the coffee table, hoping to ease the pain from the straps on the shoes biting into my swollen flesh. Dotson Rader came over and looked at me in horror. “Oh, lovey! Your poor feet!” he exclaimed. “Here, let me rub them.” While it was a little embarrassing to be in the middle of a swanky party and have someone rubbing my feet, it felt really good. Just at that moment, Norman came charging over and said, “Take your hands off my woman’s feet!” I thought at first he was kidding, but he was really upset. It was so sweet. He was jealous of Dotson! I do love Dotson, and always will, but it wasn’t like we had a romance going. He was like my brother and my best friend. Dotson and I just gave each other a look, and he got up.