A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Me, Norman, and Bill Clinton.

  TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE came out in 1984, again to mixed reviews. I always dreaded when a book came out. It seemed to me that most reviewers wanted to kill Norman. With one breath they would say he was our greatest writer, and with the next they would say the book he had just written was crap. He pretended to have rhinoceros hide, but he was hurt by it—of course he was. To devote several years of your life to a book, as he often did, and then have someone who has scarcely read it and who has few credentials rip it apart? It makes one want to do serious damage to the reviewer. (Er, any reviewers reading this are excepted, of course. All of you are lovely.) He still could quote hurtful reviews from decades past, like the one in Time, for his second book, Barbary Shore: “Paceless, tasteless, and graceless. He is marooned on an intellectual point of no return.” For some reason that one really got to him. When he got the chance to make Tough Guys Don’t Dance into a movie, he jumped at it. He needed a break from writing and the judgment of book reviewers. Not that the judgment of Hollywood reviewers was any kinder, but it would be different, at least.

  Menahem Golan, of Golan and Globus, an Israeli company, had a lot of money at the time and they were making deals all over the place. One of their deals was with Jean-Luc Godard, for a movie based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, and they wanted Norman to write the script. Norman agreed, on the condition that they give him the money to direct Tough Guys Don’t Dance as a movie. He had done three underground films (which is a rock-and-roll term for “Norman’s improvised home movies starring all his friends and family”) back in the sixties, and the time spent making those movies was some of the happiest of his life. Maybe I was just jealous because it was before I came into the picture, but I have never been a fan of those movies, even though he looks cute in them and there are some surprisingly good moments. There are also some embarrassing moments, such as the outfit he wore in Maidstone that consisted of cutoff jeans, a leather vest with no shirt, and a top hat. And moments that were pretty horrific, like when Rip Torn whacked him on the head with a hammer. With blood streaming down his head, Norman bit Rip’s ear in retaliation and sent him to the hospital with an infection. It’s a wonder neither one of them was killed.

  At any rate, Golan said yes, he could direct Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and Norman set to work writing King Lear for Godard. It was a disaster from the beginning. At the time he began the project, we were doing a workshop of Norman’s play about Marilyn Monroe, Strawhead, at the Actors Studio, with his daughter Kate playing Marilyn and me playing Amy Greene. (It was set during the time when Marilyn lived with Milton and Amy in Connecticut.) Jeannie was in it, and Adele had a small part. It was a real family production. Stephen was one of the stagehands, and Ben Stiller (Jerry Stiller and Annie Meara’s son, before he became the famous Ben Stiller) was running the lights. Godard came to see one of the rehearsals and brought a woman with him who was dressed in leather, furs, and jewels, dripping with European disdain for Americans. Norman had forgotten his glasses that morning, so I was to bring them when I got to rehearsal, but I also forgot them, to Norman’s great annoyance, and I profusely apologized. Godard overheard our conversation and said to his companion, in an arch, suggestive way, “She forgets his glasses because she does not want her husband to see his daughter playing Marilyn Monroe.” It was creepy in the extreme, but we ignored it, as Norman still had to work with him.

  Godard and the woman returned to Europe, and Norman worked on the King Lear script while we did Strawhead at the studio, which was a big success. Kate had been a star in theater at Brown and was incredible as Marilyn. She had studied her walk, her hand gestures, her facial expressions.… She got onstage and became Marilyn! Vanity Fair had her on the cover as Marilyn, and there were articles about it everywhere. After that incident, Godard then got the bright idea that he wanted Norman to act in the movie as King Lear, with Kate in the role of Cordelia, Lear’s daughter, except they would be called Norman and Kate Mailer. Already it was getting a bit strange.

  Godard flew Norman, Kate, and her present husband, Guy Lancaster, to Switzerland to film, and on the first day it became apparent he wasn’t going to use Norman’s script. He was quite open about the fact that he had never read King Lear, either the original by Shakespeare or Norman’s version, and he had no intention of using what Norman had done. Godard’s concept was a King Lear who was a modern-day film director named Norman Mailer, and it soon was obvious that said director was having some kind of unnatural relationship with his daughter. When Godard tried to stage the first scene in a hotel bedroom, Norman was in a rage and said he was not going to do it. He said he would act in a movie if he had a fictitious name and character, but he would not do the things Godard was suggesting using his own name, with his own daughter. He, Kate, and Guy packed their bags and came straight back to the States. Godard immediately called Menahem Golan to complain.

  Golan got on the phone with Norman and Godard. Godard was nearly apoplectic that Norman had dared to oppose him as he directed, and Norman said he couldn’t work with a director on King Lear who had never read King Lear. Golan said, “Is that true, Jean-Luc? That you have not read King Lear?” Jean-Luc could have lied and made Norman look bad, but he was too egotistical for that. “I do not HAVE to read King Lear!” he said. “I am Jean-Luc Godard!” Menahem threw up his hands. He knew it was hopeless, so the collaboration was over between Mailer and Godard, but Menahem was gentleman enough to allow Norman to direct Tough Guys Don’t Dance anyhow.

  Thirty-seven

  Life was busy in the early and mid-eighties. Besides painting and showing, I was still taking a few acting classes and trying to get work as an actress, although I slowly realized that I would never have a big career. The biggest part I got was on the daytime drama All My Children playing an aging ex-model named Britt Hemingway, who had sunk to dealing drugs since she was so old she couldn’t model anymore (I was thirty-four). The part lasted six months. In the story line, my character got Mark, one of the good guys, hooked on cocaine, but he finally saw the light and went to rehab and back to his wife, and Britt faded away, as those kinds of girls on soap operas usually do. It was great fun, and I got fan mail, some from guys in prison, who were big fans of the dope dealer. I even got a few letters asking if I could get someone cocaine. I replied that I could send them a packet of Epsom salts. That was what we used on the show.

  I was also working a lot at the Actors Studio at this time. I had been admitted to the Playwrights/Directors Unit through submitting a screenplay—co-written with my old teacher B. C. Hall in Arkansas, called Little Miss Little Rock—to Arthur Penn and Elia Kazan, the two legends who ran the unit. The screenplay had the same title as the novel Norman had read, the one I’d never finished, but B.C. and I took the story in a totally different direction. The screenplay actually got so far as to have someone take an option on it, and we nearly got financing a couple of times, but it always fell through, as most movie projects do.

  After I became a member of the unit, I also wrote a couple of plays that were produced at the studio. The first was a two-character one-act called Go-See that I wrote for Sally Kirkland but wound up doing myself with Rip Torn (who had long ago made peace with Norman), and the second was a short play called Double Feature with Rita Gam and Patrick Sullivan. The Actors Studio made me more confident about my writing abilities, and Norman and I had great fun doing things together there. I directed one of his short plays called The Notebook, and he directed me in Strawhead and another play or two. If one of us put up something for a session, during the critique afterward we would have great mock fights. Once, when I had criticized something he had done, he pretended to cough up a loogie (an old Brooklyn term for a wad of phlegm) into his hand and launch it at my head. I ducked, and half the audience thought he really had done it and went, “EYEEEEW.”

  We took various of the kids there, too. They used to say that while other kids went to church, they went to the Actors Studio. John was in plays from
the time he was seven or eight; Matt ran lights, did the technical work for plays, and also acted; and Stephen and Kate acted. It was a cozy, safe atmosphere in which to practice the craft, and I realized after a while that, as with modeling, I didn’t particularly want a big career. I didn’t want to go to Hollywood and work on a TV sitcom or be in a play eight times a week on Broadway. I just wanted to live with Norman and take care of the family, go to Provincetown in the summers, write and paint and do a little work at the Actors Studio once in a while for fun.

  We still had an active social life, and “Norman and Norris” became almost one word in the social columns. While we did fight a lot, almost as a sport, Norman was always there, supporting me, encouraging me in whatever I was doing, and I was there for him.

  The kids were all going to good schools and making interesting careers for themselves. They each had the dreaded twenty-fifth birthday to pass, because that was the age Dad had been when The Naked and the Dead was published, and it hung over all their heads. Rational or not, they felt that they, too, were expected to be famous young, but Norman just wanted them to be happy, and in fact he always said that becoming famous so young was the worst thing that could have happened to him. He wasn’t ready, and he didn’t know how to handle fame. It was why he’d gotten into so much trouble in his early years. With the exception of Sue, who became a psychoanalyst, all of the kids found careers in the arts one way or another. I used to laugh and say that if one of them had come to us and said they wanted to become a dentist, we would have looked at them in horror and said, “What are you thinking?” Now I wish we had a few doctors and dentists in the family.

  IN 1984 WE bought a big brick house on the beach in Provincetown that would be our home for the next twenty-three years. I loved that house. It was big enough for all of us—five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms, with Norman and me splitting the attic floor for our offices. Granted, he had three-quarters of the space and I had one, but my side was cozy. By now Norman was just that little bit older and couldn’t be as active, so every year, we were spending three months or more in Provincetown, and we went up during the year for long weekends or on holidays. Norman loved working there. It was an escape sometimes from New York’s energy, and often he would go by himself for weeks if he needed to get a big chunk of work done.

  Norman’s mother always came for part of the summer, as did his sister, Barbara, and her family. Fanny was aging dramatically. Her mind had started to wander, and she began to imagine things. The first clue I had was when she asked me one day to go with her to the cleaners; they had lost her sheets, she said, and wouldn’t give them back. I went in with her, and the man, obviously exasperated, said, “Oh, Mrs. Mailer, we don’t have your sheets! Please!” He told me she had never sent them to him, and she was just as adamant that she had and he was lying about it. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t force him to produce sheets he didn’t have, but I didn’t like to think she was, God forbid, losing her mind. After that we began to notice more and more things of that sort. Once she climbed up on the bed to kill a spider with a broom, fell off, couldn’t get up, and lay on the floor all day until I came over to visit late in the afternoon.

  After that, we got a girl named Rose to stay with her because we were also concerned about her turning on the stove and then not lighting the gas with a match, or wandering away and leaving food to burn. She immediately started reporting that Rose was stealing her long dresses, or her high heels or her teacups. We apologized to Rose and ignored it like we ignored the sheets, as the long dresses were still hanging in the closet along with the shoes, and the teacups were in the cupboard, but in the end it turned out that Rose had indeed cleaned her out of all her good jewelry and any loose cash lying around. We discovered this after Rose tried to write a hot check on Fanny’s bank account and then disappeared. Just because someone is hallucinating doesn’t mean they are always wrong.

  Fanny was living in some other land in her head much of the time now, and we found a great nurse named Eva to take care of her. Fanny still had lucid moments, and was still feisty. Once, she was uncharacteristically feeling sorry for herself, saying that it would be best if she just went ahead and died, and Eva, kidding (at least I think she was kidding), said, “Would you like me to help you along?” “Go to hell!” Fanny said to her, maybe not so ready to move on after all. After we brought her to Provincetown in the summer of 1985, she took to her bed and couldn’t really eat or drink much. Eva, Sue, Betsy, Danielle, Kate, Maggie, Barbara, and I sat beside her bed and talked to one another a lot that summer while we peeled the outer husks off silver dollar plants we found growing in the yard, and made beautiful bouquets of them. It seemed to be just a matter of time until Fanny went. The doctor said there was nothing to do except keep her comfortable.

  For his part, Norman was in denial about the situation, and would stick his head into her room every morning with a cheery “Good morning, Mom!” wave and then go about his day, as though oblivious to what was going on. He hated being around sick people, hated being sick himself, and was convinced the mind could overcome the body by an act of will if it was just strong enough. A couple of years previously, when his mother had been in better shape but clearly unable to get around well, he’d decided that if she went hiking in Maine it would do her so much good that she would be able to walk better afterward. Nothing could dissuade him—not her, not us. So we all set out on what was, for most people, an easy stroll on a relatively smooth path, but not if one is ninety-some-odd with a bad heart. She soon tired, and Peter and Michael wound up carrying her to our moored boat. The boat ride back was frightening for her as well, and the whole experience was traumatic. I felt so bad for Norman, as we all meanly said to him, “I told you so.” He was like a disappointed little boy who just knew he could fix his mother and make her like she used to be, if only she would do as he said, but it didn’t happen.

  Occasionally, Fanny would come back through the fog and say to me, “I am so sorry I have to put you through this.” Once, she said, “I’m so glad Norman has you.” It made me cry, and I knew she really did love me. We had been friends for ten years, not such a long time in her long life, but we had been real friends. She didn’t have many others outside the family.

  One day near the end of the summer, she began to ask to go home. We kept saying, “It’s just a few more weeks, Grandma. We’ll all go back to Brooklyn soon. Just hang in.” But she insisted and insisted, every day. I had gone into the city for a few days to attend an acting workshop with Ellen Burstyn, and since I had to go back to Ptown anyhow, we decided it would be convenient if Michael and Stephen brought her home, along with Eva, and then I would go back with them and get the rest of the family packed up to come back. I was waiting at her apartment when they arrived, and we got her into bed. I sat beside her for a long time, talking, and her head was relatively clear. She told me she was going to die. She used to say that frequently, and I would joke her out of it and say, “Oh, no, you’ll just get on the wrong bus and wind up in Schenectady,” but I knew she was serious, and this time I said, “Yes, darling, I think you are. Does that frighten you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m frightened.” I took her hand.

  “I don’t think you should be scared. You’ve lived a good life, and I believe that God loves us and that we go on to another life, in a different place from this one. I think your sisters and parents will be waiting for you when you get there, I think we’ll know each other, and life will be at least as interesting as it is here, except we won’t be sick or old. I think we even get a chance to come back down here and have another life. Maybe a lot of them.” She was silent for a minute.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I do,” I said, echoing the sentiments James Jones had told Norman all those years ago. “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. It is so miraculous for a baby to be born at all, isn’t it? Those two little cells coming together and growing into a whole person. What is more mirac
ulous about it happening more than once? What about a child who is killed in a car wreck when he is two years old? Is that all the life he gets? Or babies who are born dead? Do they never get another chance? I don’t think God works that way. I like to think this energy we have that makes us who we are leaves these worn-out bodies and goes somewhere else, like a driver getting out of an old car into a new one, and while we are still us—we’re the same drivers—we are so much more.” I kept talking to her, and gradually she relaxed.

  “I’d like to believe that,” she said, finally. I held her hand, and she drifted off to sleep. Then Michael, Stephen, and I got into the car and drove back to Provincetown. Labor Day weekend was coming up and we had to get the house packed up and the kids back to school. After the six-hour trip, as we walked into the house in Provincetown, the phone was ringing. It was Eva. Fanny had died peacefully just a few minutes before.

  Myrtle stayed behind with John and Maggie and Matt, and Carol came to keep them company while the older kids and Norman and I went back to New York the following day. The funeral was at Campbell’s, the ritzy Upper East Side funeral home, which Fanny would have liked. Several of Norman’s exes were there. One of his old girlfriends, Shari, a former stewardess, came wearing a white suit and a huge black and white hat with big white sunglasses, and sat in the front row, just in case someone might miss her. The curse of the old girlfriends followed me everywhere, although I should have gotten used to it.

  The burial was in Long Branch, New Jersey, where Norman had been born and all his family was buried. We caravanned out to the grave site in the late summer heat. It was a holiday weekend and the traffic was horrendous. After the rabbi said all the things he was supposed to, they began to lower the coffin into the grave. Except the coffin was way too big for the hole. Of course we had picked out a tank of a coffin, with comfy innerspring mattress and all the chrome doodads, while the Jewish tradition was to bury in a modest plain wooden box that took up much less space. We looked around for the grave diggers, but they had gone off on lunch break. Someone from the cemetery jumped into the car and frantically went searching every McDonald’s and Wendy’s in the vicinity while we all stood in the sun, waiting for them to come back. After an eternity, they arrived, two men in dirty T-shirts, one fat with his exposed belly hanging over his pants, and one skinny, his pants in danger of falling off his hip bones at any moment. We lined up and watched them work. They dug, then tried to fit the coffin, took it out, and dug some more. At one point, the fat one jumped into the hole and started bouncing up and down on the coffin, trying to pound it in, but we all started yelling at him to stop, so they had to keep digging. I can only imagine what Fanny was saying. “Young man, you stop that! Have a little respect! I’m the mother of a famous man! You can just dig a proper hole, and stop all this foolishness!”