A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  “What makes you think I want Jack back out on the streets?” I was flabbergasted. “Jack doesn’t belong out on the streets. He is going to do this again and again if he gets out. I want Jack to go back to jail. Forever.” Ivan’s smile dropped off his face.

  “But you don’t want Jack to go down for murder, do you?”

  “Jack murdered somebody! I don’t care. It wasn’t premeditated, I’m sure, but I don’t want him out on the streets. He is too nervous, too volatile. He can’t deal with the pressure. He thinks everyone on the street is waiting to kill him. He would do it again, I know it.”

  He sent me back home in the long white limousine he had at the time. That rocky introduction started a friendship for Norman and me with Ivan and his girlfriend, later his wife, Diane, who became my best friend in New York.

  I never went to see Jack in prison. I just couldn’t. I had nothing to say to him. I couldn’t give him any words of comfort. I couldn’t say it would be all right, because it wouldn’t. It was going to end badly, as it was always destined to, before Jack had even one brief moment of seeing clear blue sky in his sad life of looking through dingy glass.

  The trial started, and of course we went every day. I couldn’t let Norman go by himself, even though I dreaded waking up, knowing I had to go. Getting through the press was like running a gauntlet. I was shoved and whacked in the head by cameras as reporters lunged for Norman. Norman was never cool under pressure, and tended to get angry and say stupid things when goaded, and the press are experts in goading. I knew what Norman was trying to say when he said “Culture is worth a little risk,” but I wouldn’t have put it that way. It is true that if no one in prison ever had the chance of redemption, it would be a sorry fact, but to throw out a statement like that was like throwing meat to hungry dogs. “I Would Help Killer Again,” was another ugly headline.

  Norman probably would have helped Jack again, but in a different way, I’m sure. That’s the way Norman was. He tried to help people; he got pleasure from it. He always felt guilty that he hadn’t made more time to spend with Jack, that he’d let me go out with Jack day after day while he’d worked, but, frankly, I don’t think it would have made much difference if he’d spent every waking moment with Jack. The truth was that Norman and Jack didn’t really like each other on a personal level, and it was tough spending time with him. While some of Jack’s letters were indeed brilliant, there were also his forty-five-page letters in which he ranted on about whatever he was in a rage about at the moment—capitalism, religion, whatever.

  It’s no secret Norman always had a huge ego; he believed he could change the course of a river by the strength of his personality, but he was sometimes naïve in the extreme. He didn’t consider that while a violent person can be a philosopher of violence, he is nevertheless still a violent person, and just because he is a talented writer doesn’t mean he doesn’t also have a screw or two that are too loose to keep his head together. While I don’t believe Norman was inherently a violent person, in spite of certain episodes in his history before he met me, Norman was intrigued with it. He had analyzed violence, studied it his whole life, played with it in his imagination.

  I hadn’t read “The White Negro” when I met him, but that was the document that a lot of people used to point out how crazy and violent he was. That plus the fact that he had stabbed his second wife, Adele—no small event. Of course, I knew about that when we got together, or pretty soon after, but I never for a minute worried about my own safety. At the time of that tragedy, Norman had been going through a period in his life when he and Adele had been drinking heavily and doing drugs, and it seemed to me that it was another person who had done those things.

  He would tell me stories and I’d listen, like it was bedtime fiction. I wanted to believe—in fact, I did believe; I couldn’t have been with him otherwise—that he had changed, that he had gone through the fire and come out cleaner and forged of stronger steel. I knew how much he loved me. I knew he was inherently a good man, that all he wanted to do was help someone better himself, but the one thing Norman never had was the ability to understand that not everyone was like him. Not everyone could pull himself out of the grasp of mental illness by an act of willpower and come back to win Pulitzer Prizes and lead a good life. There was evil in the world, not theoretical evil but real, pulsating, visceral evil, that couldn’t be explained away, no matter how much talent the person had. Norman flirted with the idea of evil, and he certainly considered the devil to be as real as God, but I don’t think he ever understood that it was a force that was equal to a raging forest fire against the match flame of his will.

  I was friends at this time with Susan Sarandon, and she and Chris Walken wanted to go to court to watch the trial one day. I don’t know if they were thinking of doing a movie with Chris playing Abbott and Susan playing me, but there was an element of research to it. Actors always want to watch real life. They soak it up like sponges and use it later in a character, whether it is the exact character or not. At any rate, Norman said they could come with us, not realizing the chaos that would ensue when we showed up with the two of them. Our pictures were on the front pages of all the papers, and I really feared for our safety going through the mass of press outside the courthouse. No bodyguards in those days.

  A friend of mine who was a photographer wore a miniskirt to court one day and was walking around the courtroom before the trial began, talking to some of the press and sketch artists who were friends of hers, and someone mistakenly printed that it was me, flitting around the court in a short skirt talking to reporters, trying to get myself into the papers. It was humiliating, but there was nothing to do about stories like that. Every day brought some new indignity, some new lie to contend with.

  Time magazine said that Norman and Jack should be shackled together in prison; several other articles said Norman should be sent to prison as well. We got death threats; our children were threatened. All of the other people who had helped Jack, who had written letters supporting him, just faded away, and Norman was left to take the brunt of the ugly publicity all alone. What nobody seemed to understand was that a private citizen, even a famous person, can’t just go and get someone out of jail. There has to be a reason why a prisoner is released.

  Later we found out, through a letter from another prisoner, that the reason Jack had been let out early on parole was that he had turned snitch and ratted out several of his fellow inmates. From the article by M. A. Farber in The New York Times, we learned that Jack had given a secret, sworn statement at Marion Prison on December 12, 1980, that had provided information about other inmates and had made a series of accusations against the Marion Prisoners’ Rights Project, a lawyers’ group. The group had instigated one of the longest inmate work stoppages in the history of the federal prison system, and Marion Prison was trying to ban them as “agitators.” Jack Abbott was desperate to get out of prison. He felt he was going to be murdered at any moment, even by the lawyers.

  The people who wrote letters in support of Jack were never told any of this by the parole board, and were never told about Jack’s long history of violence. Jack’s supporters didn’t know that his medical records were full of references to paranoia and his potential for violence. From the Times article, we learned that Dr. Steven Shelton of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, stated as early as 1973 that the prisoner was a “potentially dangerous man” with a “hair trigger temper.” And in the same article we learned that Thomas R. Harrison, the chairman of the Utah board of pardons, said at Jack’s parole hearing, “Here’s a man who has a great deal going for him, and against him is one outstanding factor. And that’s an extremely violent temper, explosive at times.” Addressing Jack, Harrison said, “The street is a real world, too. There are going to be disappointments; there are going to be people who rub you the wrong way, who make you angry. And it’s of great concern to the board how you’re going to react to this situation.”

  Jack replied that no one had given a damn
for him since he was a child and that he “grew up in a cage where you’ve got to fight your way through all that.… The only way you can do that is by getting angry. It’s a rational anger, but it isn’t anything else. I’m not violent to where I’m going to go out and be a maniac, if that’s what you mean.” Harrison replied, “What we’re interested in is your potential for hurting somebody. You say there is no such potential, right?”

  “No, no,” said Jack. “No. There won’t be nothing like that.”

  Perhaps it’s true that Harrison was swayed by the letters Norman and the others sent speaking of Jack’s talent, or the fact that he was publishing a book; possibly Harrison just wanted to believe that it was feasible for a man to change, and here was a chance to prove it. I’m sure he knew as well as anyone how many men who walked out those doors on parole walked right back in again. Conceivably Jack’s release was just part of the deal, an exchange for names he had given to the parole board. For whatever reasons, Jack was let out early, but it wasn’t simply because Norman Mailer wrote a letter.

  In the thick of the threats and news stories, I seriously thought about taking Matt and John and going to Arkansas for a while, until the trial was over and the press stories died down, but I couldn’t let Norman stay and take it all by himself. Norman said, “If someone wants to kill us, they will kill us no matter what we do. I’m not running away from my responsibilities.” I couldn’t run away from his responsibilities, either.

  Of course, eventually it was over. Jack was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years to life, but we got new friends out of it—Jack’s lawyer, Ivan Fisher, and his wife, Diane; and Bill Majeskie, the detective who caught Jack, and Bill’s wife, Evelyn. I think it was a lesson for Norman in the true nature of violence and a shock for him to see just how little he could influence the life of someone else with the force of his personality. I hoped with all my heart that he wouldn’t drag the family into anything as dangerous ever again, because I realized more than ever that I could never influence Norman by an act of will, no matter how angry I got or how I tried to reason with him.

  A small coda to the story: many years later, Jack committed suicide in prison. (There was doubt as to whether it was really suicide or someone helped him along.) I had a friend named Rosamond who had recently passed away and who had been quite a powerful psychic. Over the years she’d predicted a lot of things for me that had come true, such as health issues and the births of both my grandchildren. Not long after she died, her cousin Kiana had a dream. In the dream, Rosamond came to Kiana and said for her to tell me that a man named Jack H. was on the other side, and he wanted to send me a message. He wanted me to know he was sorry he messed it all up and caused me so much pain. Kiana asked if it might be an old boyfriend, but the only Jack H. I ever knew was Jack Henry Abbott.

  Thirty-six

  After Abbott was sent back to jail, the newspapers found new headlines. Norman threw himself into his work. Pieces and Pontifications came out in 1982, and in April 1983, Ancient Evenings was published to mixed—mostly bad—reviews, but it reached number six on the Times bestseller list and got a huge amount of publicity. Norman was on the cover of New York magazine as the pharaoh (which I privately think he had to have been in a past life; there is no other explanation for him). It was another fat tome that almost nobody finished, but it is my favorite of all his books. I have read it seven or more times in one draft or another, and every few years I pick it up again, always finding new things I didn’t remember, surprising bits of magic I’d forgotten. I think it is a tour de force, a densely woven tapestry of a great tale, but the only two reviewers who understood it at all were Anthony Burgess and Joan Didion. I don’t think a lot of them even read the whole book.

  Instead of going to Maine, we spent July in New York. I put John in a YMCA day camp, and Matt went to visit his father and grandparents in Arkansas for a few weeks. Norman was working on a book he was calling Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a kind of noir thriller set in Provincetown, and he had to finish it in two months because with everything else that had been going on, he had let the deadline get too near.

  It was boiling hot in the apartment, and because of the configuration of the windows, we couldn’t get air-conditioning; fans just smeared the hot air around. I hardly saw Norman at all. He worked from late morning until around nine at night, when he’d come home for dinner, and then we’d fall into bed to sleep, fitfully, in the heat. But it was a happy time, too, for us.

  One day there was a particularly brilliant sunset, and as I always did on good sunset days, I called Matt and John to the window to look at it. “Boys! Come and look at the sunset!” They would drop their toys or whatever they were doing and troop over to the window, and we would all three put our arms around one another and watch until the red ball of the sun dropped behind the horizon. Then they would go back to playing. On one such day, I had the conscious thought that this was the happiest moment of my life, that everything I’d always wanted I had, right here in Brooklyn with my family and Norman, and I was content. There have been a lot of those moments in my life, and I am grateful for all of them.

  I had been showing my paintings at a restaurant/gallery called Central Falls in SoHo, the same place where Edie Vonnegut, my studio mate, showed. It was run by a sweet guy named Bruce Goldstein, and I always did well, usually selling at least half of the paintings.

  Me and my painting Hot Springs.

  I’d just taken down a show, and Aurora Huston (née Young), who you’ll remember had been my best friend in college, wrote and asked if I wanted to come to Arkansas and have a show at a gallery she was representing called the Sketch Box in Little Rock. It would be a chance to see my old friends and have some fun, maybe sell some more paintings. Jean Jewell would be there, too. It had been way too long since Aurora, Jean, and I had seen one another.

  Aurora.

  I packed up all the paintings I had left from the Central Falls show, and Norman, Matt, John, and I went down. Dotson Rader and Pat Lawford also came. They wanted to see Arkansas and were always up for a little adventure. We all stayed at a motel called the Lagniappe, which is Cajun for “a little extra.” At that time, Bill Clinton was in office as governor, and I invited him and Hillary to the opening. We also gave a small dinner for the gallery owners at a Chinese restaurant that the Clintons attended, and Norman got along well with them both, Hillary especially. He later said, “That might be the brightest woman I’ve ever met.” I wasn’t even offended. I had known a long time ago how bright she was. I was delighted that they liked each other, and I was happy that Bill and I could still be friends. I guess there was a little part of me (maybe not so little) that wanted to show Norman off and let Bill know I was capable of having a relationship with someone who was an intellectual, too, and while I don’t think he was eating his heart out, he was maybe impressed a little. If he was anything, Norman was impressive. But then so are Bill and Hillary. I was so proud of them years later when they gained national prominence, and my New York friends thought I was some kind of psychic genius because I had been telling them for years that a man from Arkansas named Bill Clinton was going to be president one day.

  Dotson Rader and me in Arkansas at the Razorback football game.

  It was great fun to see them again, to get to know Hillary a little bit, and the show was a big success. A lot of my family came to the opening party, and my mother and my aunt Ella Belle, a teetotaling Assemblies of God Christian who had probably never tasted alcohol in her life, took a glass of champagne off a tray, and she and my mother giggled like two little girls as they tasted it and made sour faces, my father looking on at them with disapproval. Dotson and Pat, who was dressed to the nines in jewelry and designer clothes, mingled and had a great time. Dotson and I sang gospel hymns, as we were prone to do at the drop of a hat, but down there everyone else knew them, too, so it wasn’t as exotic as it was when we sang at parties in New York. People just thought we were acting a little strange.

&nbs
p; Norman loved to tell the story of how one little old blue-haired lady came over to him at the reception and said, “Oh, Mr. Church, you must be so proud of your wife!” He then grumbled that he finally understood why all of his wives complained about being in his shadow.

  The Clintons had us over to the governor’s mansion for a drink, and Pat was clearly taken with young Bill. She was nothing if not politically astute, and to her, he was the perfect man to run for president. Pat danced around the subject, easing into it, but finally leaned in and asked him if he thought he might ever run for national office, and he admitted he had thought about it (he’d been thinking about it since he was eight), but it was too early for him. He wanted to work at being governor awhile longer, make contacts, really get things prepared before he made the big jump. (He’d won the governorship in 1978, lost it in 1980, and regained it the previous year, 1982. He went on to serve for ten more years.)

  Pat’s green eyes glowed. I could see the wheels already turning, planning what she was going to do to help him. Pat liked winners, and Bill was clearly a big one. Norman was warming to the subject, too, and the discussion was lively. Then, a uniformed policeman came in and said he was sorry to interrupt us but he had just received an emergency call that Mrs. Lawford’s son had been rushed to the hospital. He didn’t spell out that it was a drug overdose, but there were few other things it could have been. Pat had to leave immediately. She was as angry as I had seen her since the night with Jack Abbott. She turned to all of us, fire shooting out of her green eyes, and said, “If he’s not dead when I get there, I’m going to kill him.” (Fortunately, she called later to say he was all right.)