A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  “Why couldn’t you have just bought a plain gold band? That would have been much better than this. I don’t care about diamonds [which was a big fat lie, I’d been hoping for one], but I am not going to wear these teeny diamond chips. And I hate rubies. Have you ever once seen me in a red piece of jewelry? Don’t you know me at all? How do I take my coffee?”

  “Your coffee? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Do you know how I take my coffee in the morning?”

  “I don’t know. Black?”

  “You take yours black! I drink it with milk and sugar. See, you’ve never even noticed. You don’t know the smallest thing about me.” I was in tears, for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with the ring or the coffee, I’m sure. He was furious that I was being ungracious about his choice of ring, so in a foul humor, we went back to Tiffany’s to change it. We were so angry with each other that he walked down one side of the street and I the other. As a compromise, we got a plain gold band and added another little diamond and ruby band as a guard on either side, which made it look more substantial. Then we went back home and waited. There was nothing all day, then late Monday afternoon, the doorbell rang. It was the papers from Haiti.

  Tuesday morning dawned, a cold, bright November day, and I woke up early to find Norman sitting on his side of the bed holding his head in his hands. I studied him with sleepy eyes. He looked so depressed. A feeling of woe came off him, as if he would rather do anything today than go through another marriage; as if he were thinking he couldn’t keep on having children with women and marrying them, there had to be a stopping place. The woe crept into me. I thought, “Maybe I should tell him to forget the whole thing.” Maybe he was sorry he had left Carol and wanted still to be with her. Maybe he just didn’t want to be married at all, to have no responsibilities and do as he pleased. I had been looking forward to this day for years, but if even a little part of him didn’t want to marry me, then I didn’t want to marry him.

  “Sweetie? What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

  “All my life, all I have ever wanted was to be free and alone in Paris.” He said it so sadly. I was right. He didn’t want to marry me. Should I offer to step aside and let him go to Paris? Was that what he really wanted? I leaned up on my elbow and gently put my hand on his arm.

  “Look, sweetie. What would happen if you were free and alone in Paris? You would be walking down one of the boulevards and you’d sit at a sidewalk café to have a cup of espresso. A pretty girl would walk by and you would give her one of your twenty-five-cent smiles. She would smile back and stop to talk. You would invite her to sit and buy her a cup of coffee. You’d go to a museum, and then take her out to dinner. Soon she would be living with you, and then she would get pregnant, and you wouldn’t be free and alone in Paris anymore, would you?”

  John Buffalo, two and a half, came in, sleepy-eyed, climbed into bed with us as he did every morning, and snuzzled down under the covers. Norman laughed and said, “You know me too well. It’s scary. Okay. Let’s go get married and legitimize this little bugger.”

  Norman, me, and the “little bugger” Buffalo.

  So we kicked it into high gear. I called my mother and daddy and my closest friends. Pat Lawford sent over a case of champagne. Jan Cushing, who was my eight-months-pregnant matron of honor, had a wedding cake delivered. I ran out and bought a champagne-colored satin suit, and Judith got on the phone with our other friends and family. “What are you doing today at five? Want to come to a wedding?”

  Norman and I rushed to get the marriage license. David Dinkins (later the mayor) was the city clerk who gave it to us. We invited him to the wedding, as well as Mayor Ed Koch, both of whom came. Everyone came. It was all a big crazy blur of our friends and family. Michael, unfortunately, was away at school in Andover and Sue was in Mexico, but most of the kids were there. Matt and John Buffalo, of course, Betsy, Kate, and Danielle. Stephen, fourteen at the time, was the best man. John wore a little burgundy velvet sailor suit with a white satin collar. During the ceremony he kept asking, “When are we going to cut the cake?”

  We hadn’t thought about pictures at all, but Dotson wanted to take pictures, and the only film we had in the house was an old Polaroid camera, which jammed after the first one, so our only wedding picture was of me, Norman, and Father Pete Jacobs in the kitchen after the ceremony. Norman looks like he is in shell shock, I am smiling so wide my face is about to crack, and Father Pete looks worried because he was always in trouble with his church. He couldn’t marry us, of course, because Norman was Jewish and I was Baptist—forget our checkered marital pasts—but he was a friend and we wanted him to do something, so he read a poem—for which he was reprimanded when his church found out. A rabbi named David Glazer performed the actual ceremony, and for years I heard he told everyone we were members of his congregation. I was so grateful to him, I didn’t even care. If he had asked us to join his temple, I would have.

  Norman, me, and Father Pete Jacobs at the wedding.

  It would have been nice if my parents had been able to come, but they were so thrilled that we were finally getting married, it didn’t matter. I was no longer the tootsie; I was the wife. What a difference it made, not just in my feelings, but in the way the world treated me. Now we got invitations to Mr. and Mrs. Norman Mailer, not Norman Mailer and guest. I could say “my husband”; I was Mrs. Mailer when I called a restaurant for reservations; I had the same last name as my son. A hundred little things changed with the signing of one piece of paper. We had been living together for more than five years, talking about it every single day, and finally we were married. I had never been so happy.

  We left the guests eating cake and drinking champagne, and off we went for a week in London. I spent my wedding night, high over the Atlantic Ocean, staring at my wedding rings, which sparkled in the overhead reading light. I had changed my mind about the tiny rubies and diamonds. Never underestimate small stones. They have their fire, too.

  The morning after our arrival, I was as emotionally worn out by everything that had preceded the trip as I was by the jet lag. Norman had to get up early and be at Shepperton Studios by seven o’clock to shoot his big scene, but I was going to sleep all day if I could. He had been gone only a short while when the phone rang. It was Milos Forman.

  “Norris, are you asleep? I’m sorry, but can you come out here at once? Norman is in a scene where he is enjoying a show of dancing girls, and he just pointed out that Stanford White would not be at a table alone at such an event. He would have a beautiful woman there with him. I want you to be that woman. I want you to be in the picture.”

  I jumped out of bed, threw on clothes, and ran out to the waiting car. The movie was based on the book Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow, which was set in 1906 and centered on the killing of the famous architect Stanford White by socialite Harry K. Thaw, who was married to Evelyn Nesbit, a former showgirl and ex-lover of White’s. Thaw discovered Evelyn was not a virgin on their wedding night, and she then implied that White had raped her at age sixteen. Thaw became obsessed with the architect and finally shot him at close range in Madison Square Garden, which White had designed, in the middle of a show, Mamzelle Champagne.

  I was to play the girl at the table with Stanford White, his date of the moment, and as soon as I got to the set, they hurried me into period costume and did up my long hair into a Gibson Girl do, and there I was, guzzling ginger ale champagne with Norman at the table while Donald O’Connor led the chorus girls in a song called “I Could Love a Thousand Girls.” It was a tricky scene, as Norman/Stanford gets shot and killed. He had been outfitted with a small blast pack taped to a metal plate that protected his head—underneath a wig that looked like his hair—and was attached to a tube that snaked down his neck, under his clothes, and ended under the table, where a special effects man was waiting to pump fake blood out the head wound and onto the floor. They could do only two takes, as they had only two wigs and suits of clothes, so it had to go perfectly
. Norman was to stand, turn, and fall with his right side next to the floor so the tubing wouldn’t show. My job was to kneel beside him and scream bloody murder. The rehearsals went fine, and they packed Norman’s ears with wax and cotton so the sound from the blast wouldn’t damage his hearing.

  Norman and me in the scene from Ragtime.

  “Action,” Milos called out, and the band started the song; the dancers began to dance. I took a sip of my ginger ale and laughed with Norman/Stanford, who was wearing a big bushy mustache, the only thing on him that looked at all like the real White. Thaw, played by Robert Joy, rushed up with a maniacal look on his face, shot the gun, the blasting cap went off, and Norman stood, turned, and fell perfectly. The only thing that went wrong is that when he fell, he whacked his head on the heavy silver champagne bucket next to the table and there was a real cut with real blood coming out of his forehead. I was screaming my heart out, looking at the real wound, and then Milos said, “Cut! That was perfect.” Norman didn’t move. I nudged him. “Norman? The scene is over. You can get up.” He remained perfectly still. I thought he had knocked himself out on the champagne bucket for real, and started shaking him. He resisted me, trying to remain motionless. Finally, Milos came over and yelled, “Norman! It’s okay! The scene is over.” Norman couldn’t hear him and thought I’d just been overacting. He’d been trying to remain dead. I was never so relieved to see someone open their eyes. We got him cleaned up and did a second take just in case, but the first take was the one they kept. Our honeymoon had started with a bang.

  Thirty-four

  Soon after publication of The Executioner’s Song, Norman wrote a script for a four-hour NBC miniseries that was based on the book. I had left the modeling agency after Wilhelmina had tragically died of lung cancer in 1980. I’d then signed up with William Morris, thinking I needed a real acting agency, especially after my spectacular screaming performance in Ragtime. Who knew where that might lead? I was studying acting at Herbert Berghof Studio in the Village, and while my agent had sent me on several auditions, I hadn’t gotten many parts, just a couple of day player bits on soap operas—parts called “under fours” because they were under four lines of dialogue. The Executioner’s Song was a perfect opportunity for me to continue my acting career. The only problem was that there was only one small part that might even be feasible for me in the movie, the role of a girl named Lu-Ann who worked in a factory and had gone out on a date with Gary Gilmore when he’d first gotten out of prison. She was not a particularly attractive girl. She was a bit sour with a no-nonsense approach to life, but they have a date, Gary gets drunk on beer and tries to put the make on her, she lectures him, like a schoolmarm, on having to work for what he gets, and he scares her.

  Larry Schiller, who was directing the film, said I was too glamorous for the part; he wouldn’t even let me read for it. But I had to be in the movie, I just had to! Like Lucy Ricardo, I was going to weasel myself into the movie or bust. If Larry thought I was too beautiful, then I would show him. I have never, at least not while compos mentis, gone out in public without my makeup on, but on this day I not only didn’t put on makeup, I greased my face with cream to make my complexion shiny and ugly, and I combed my hair in the style that used to be beloved by poor Arkansas girls in the fifties. The top half of it was piled in a kind of biscuit thing held up by bobby pins, and the bottom hung down long, with a white part separating the two halves. The girls who wore it usually had bangs, too, and little spit curls in front of their ears, but I didn’t go that far. I cut off a pair of jeans and put on a baggy blouse with elastic around the neck, and flip-flops. I didn’t even recognize myself.

  Then I went up to the Helmsley Palace on Madison Avenue, where Larry was staying. The men at the desk immediately came out to greet me, and I asked for Larry Schiller. They asked my name, and I said Lucille McGillicuddy. I said I was an actress, there for an audition. They stepped over to the side and had a little confab, while I looked them and the place over, like it was the first time I’d ever seen a big hotel, or anybody wearing a necktie, for that matter. Finally, they must have decided to let Larry deal with it rather than risk a scene, so they let me into the elevator and I rode up to the fifth floor and knocked on his door. He opened it and looked me full in the face for an entire minute or more, uncomprehendingly, until I started laughing. Then it dawned on him who I was, and he grinned that possum grin of his and said, “You have the part.”

  We started filming in Utah in the fall of 1981, with Tommy Lee Jones playing Gary Gilmore and Rosanna Arquette playing his girlfriend, Nicole. Tommy Lee would go on to win an Emmy for this performance, but he played Gary as an exuberant boy who just got let out of detention rather than as the depressed, psychotic man I think Gary actually was. Convicts speak of flattening time in jail, and if you flatten enough time, you, yourself, become flat, but it was Tommy Lee’s choice to make him manic, and it worked for the film in the end.

  In our scene, we start in the bar and then go for a drive in my car. We were filming in November, although it was supposed to be summer, and it was freezing that night. I was dressed in a short-sleeved thin top, and Tommy Lee was wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out. They had done my hair up in a beehive and used blue eye shadow and red lipstick. I looked better than I had at the Helmsley Palace, but not by much. In the bar scene, Tommy Lee was drinking real beer, and by the time we had moved to the car, he was feeling pretty relaxed. He had just gotten married, and his wife, Kim, was there that night. I remember her standing on the sidewalk and waving as we drove by, and him saying, “Look at her in those little bootsies. Isn’t she a cutie?” She was indeed a cutie, and I was happy he was so in love. It was so cold that both of us were shivering in our summer outfits, and between takes we grabbed our coats from the backseat and huddled under them for warmth. We had to suck on ice cubes so our breath wouldn’t fog in the air, which only made us colder. At some point, someone brought us cold Chinese food, which we ate for dinner, and by the end of the night, Tommy Lee had gone through I don’t know how many cans of beer. The last take, where he gets angry and throws the beer can out the window, was verging on being really scary. But we had it.

  Thirty-five

  When word first got out that Norman was writing a book about Gary Gilmore, he started getting letters from prisoners. A lot of them. Most were on the order of “Why are you wasting your time on that bum Gilmore when my story is so much better?” (P.S. They all were innocent.) One letter he got was different. The guy said that he knew Gilmore, and if Norman wanted to know what being in prison was really like, he was the one to tell him. It was signed Jack Henry Abbott, and Norman showed it to me and said it was surprisingly well written. I never intruded into Norman’s writing or research unless he asked me to read something, but I hated the whole idea of him getting so involved in the lives of prisoners. I felt like all of them were con men. Still, Norman and Jack started a correspondence, and Norman found Jack’s letters to be most helpful for The Executioner’s Song.

  Over time, more and more letters came from Jack, one or more nearly every day. Jack described how life in prison worked, the brutality, the relationships with the guards, how you had to demand respect, how you were either a stand-up guy or a punk. The lowest level of person in prison was the snitch. Most snitches didn’t live long. In due course, Norman told Jack he thought the correspondence could make an interesting book. Norman would write a preface for it. The book was called In the Belly of the Beast, and others thought it was worthy of publication as well.

  Jason Epstein, Norman’s editor, brought it to Random House, where Erroll McDonald, another editor there, took it on as a project. The novelist Jerzy Kosinski was also interested in Jack and had corresponded with him for years. Bob Silvers, the editor and one of the founders of The New York Review of Books, Lionel Abel, the essayist, and other major players in the publishing world also championed Jack’s writing. They compared him to Jean Genet, a French convict who turned his life around and became a succe
ssful novelist and playwright. Genet had been helped by Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and other prominent artists in France. In much the same spirit, Jack’s admirers wrote to the Utah parole board saying they thought Jack was a real talent who could have a career as a writer. They all would help him.

  Jack was due for a regular parole hearing, but nobody seriously thought he was going to be let out. He was a career criminal whose Chinese mother had been a prostitute and his father a G.I. who had abandoned them. He was a troublesome boy and went to reform school when he was about twelve; his mother committed suicide somewhere along the line, and he became what they called a state-raised child. After reform school, he went to prison in 1963, when he was nineteen, for breaking into a shoe store and stealing checks, which he then wrote out to himself. Three years into that sentence, he killed an inmate in a knife fight and was given an additional sentence of three to twenty years.