A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Finally, it was over, and Michael, Stephen, Norman, and I set out to make the long trip back to Provincetown one more time. A bad storm blew up after sunset, and the rain pelted down so hard we could hardly see the road and had to pull over several times. We said the storm was Fanny, railing against the fat man who’d jumped on her coffin, and who’s to say it wasn’t?

  Thirty-eight

  In the summer of 1986 preproduction started on Tough Guys Don’t Dance. This time, I wasn’t dying to be in the movie. I frankly didn’t like the script, and I couldn’t talk to Norman about it. He didn’t want to hear any of my criticisms. In fact, he really didn’t want me involved at all. He said I was too negative. He ended up asking me to read for one of the parts, I think just to placate me in case I ever complained, or maybe he was curious to see what I would do with the role, but I wasn’t right for it and we both knew it. The part eventually went to Isabella Rossellini, who starred with Ryan O’Neal.

  In putting on his director’s hat, Norman suddenly became someone else, a bit of the old rascal Norman, the one I had never met, a man who would approach a beautiful woman at a cocktail party and say, “Hi there, I’m Norman Mailer. I’m directing a movie, and you might be right for one of the roles.” I could see how he used to seduce women in ten minutes, as he had bragged. Once, at a party, he was talking to Kathleen Turner, his back nearly touching mine, but he had no idea I was standing there. He told her he was making a movie and asked if she was interested in talking to him about it over lunch. I stood frozen to the spot, waiting to hear what she had to say, which was that she had no interest in his movie or lunch with him, although she said it in a nice way. I turned around and tapped him on the shoulder. The look on his face was almost worth it.

  During this time, he was away in L.A. a lot, casting and meeting with the producers, getting the crew assembled, and the rest of the things involved in making a movie. I stayed home with the kids for the most part, although once in a while he would take me with him on a trip to California. I was also going to Arkansas frequently. My father had had a heart attack a few years before, and he was in and out of the hospital for several small procedures, a pacemaker and stents, so Norman’s and my lives were at cross-purposes a lot during this time. I realized that somewhere along the line I had ceased to be the exciting girlfriend who would hold his hand and jump across the burning roofs. I had become the wife. I finally stopped pretending to be more athletic than I was, more wicked than I was, more adventurous than I was. The Baptist in me showed through my glamorous veneer whether I wished it to or not, and I became the solid base who held down the household and took care of our life and family, while Norman was out setting fires without me.

  He had just come off a yearlong adventure as president of the PEN American Center, the writers’ organization, where he had raised a million dollars to host the PEN World Congress in New York. It was a magnificent achievement. He had taken a small, threadbare organization of writers and put it on the New York social map by getting people such as billionaires Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg involved. It was a worthy cause that was also chic, an irresistible combination for many in New York society. (Among other good things, PEN supports freedom to write in countries around the world and helps writers who have been unjustly imprisoned, and the world congress was a chance for writers from every country to come together, discuss ideas, and be part of a vast supportive brotherhood.) Norman stopped work for an entire year to devote all his time to fund-raising. The grand finale of the many fund-raisers was a series of readings at a Broadway theater on Monday nights, with two famous writers reading per night.

  LETTER FROM NORMAN TO GORE VIDAL

  NOVEMBER 20, 1984

  Dear Gore,

  I was talking about you to Nina [Auchincloss] last night at a party and decided it was time to write a letter. Our feud, whatever its roots for each of us, has become a luxury. It’s possible in years to come that we’ll both have to be manning the same leaking sinking boat at the same time. Apart from that, I’d still like to make up. An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you.

  In addition to this: I’d like you to speak at one of the evenings we’re going to have in preparation for the PEN World Congress at the end of 1985, or the beginning of 1986. To raise funds for such a Congress, PEN will present a subscription series ($1000 per patron for the full ten evenings) at. One or two writers on each given evening, will do whatever they wish. Altogether we’ll have a total of 15 novelists. So far, it’s Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut, Bill Styron, John Updike, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Irving, Tom Wolfe, William Buckley, Arthur Miller, and myself. The assumption is that some writers will want a full evening to themselves, and others will wish to share it. I know Jason [Epstein, Norman’s editor] has already issued this invitation to you, but I repeat, if you like the idea, I’d be happy to introduce you for your evening or half-evening—whichever you choose. Please consider this. We won’t have a full roster without you.

  If you decide in the negative, that will be disappointing, but has no effect on the first paragraph of this letter.

  Cheers,

  Norman

  Gore chose to share an evening with Norman. It was the first time they had been on the same stage since the Dick Cavett show. The series was a howling success, the million dollars was finally raised, and writers from all over the world poured into New York.

  The night before Norman was to give the opening greeting at the world congress, we went to a reading of a play by an old friend, Roger Donoghue. He and his wife, Faye, lived in the National Arts Club, a Victorian building on Gramercy Park, and we always loved visiting them. Faye is a well-known painter of racehorses; her paintings are at racetracks and in collections all around the world. Roger had been a promising welterweight fighter until he accidently killed a man in the ring. (Roger was the one who said the famous line “I coulda been a contender” to Budd Schulberg, who used it in his script of On the Waterfront, which helped make Marlon Brando famous.) After killing the boxer, Roger got the collywobbles and quit. No one could blame him. He made a nice living selling beer and doing other things, but he had always secretly loved the theater and wanted to be a playwright. His play was about the unlikely friendship between Guy Lombardo and Louis Armstrong in the forties, when it was still jim crow across much of the country and black performers couldn’t even walk through the same doors as white ones, never mind eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels. One problem with the play was that only the Lombardo family had given Roger permission to use the music, so he wasn’t able to use any of Louis Armstrong’s great songs. Still, it was only a reading, and while it wasn’t a masterpiece, we all knew it was a work in progress, and we all loved Roger so we clapped and cheered and told him how great it was. Except for Norman. He could never fudge his feelings about anything. His theory was that anyone should be delighted to get the benefit of his criticism in order to make something better, so he of course told Roger in great detail exactly what, in his opinion, was wrong with the play.

  We had gone to dinner at Joe Allen, and as Norman went on critiquing the play, Roger’s mood went from euphoric to somber to black. Norman didn’t notice. He just kept on, really getting into it. Trying to be the chirpy little wife, I interjected that I thought there were some great moments in the play, and I tried to change the subject, but I was ignored in Norman’s onslaught. Faye and I just sat silently, looking at each other in misery.

  Finally, we paid the check and were standing by the curb waiting for a taxi when Roger started to mock-box with Norman. It was something they often did. Norman loved boxing and in those days boxed every weekend with a group of friends at the Gramercy Gym. He was in pretty good shape at sixty-two. They pretend-sparred, stopping their punches just short of each other’s chins and rib cages, until a taxi pulled up. Then, as I kissed Faye good night and started to get into the car, Roger flipped a nice easy little punch that grazed Norman right between t
he eyes. It was like the work of a skilled surgeon, his forefinger and little finger were held open so that his nails made a crescent cut underneath each of Norman’s eyes. It neatly broke his nose. I didn’t see what was going on, but I heard Norman swear, and saw him knock Roger’s hand away. Then he got into the cab after me, and I got a look at his face. Blood was running down both cheeks, and he was fumbling for his handkerchief. Of course he wouldn’t hear of going to the emergency room, so we went home and I put ice on it until he went to bed.

  In the morning, both eyes were black and swollen, he could hardly breathe through his nose, and he was due to speak at the PEN World Congress that evening. I ran out and bought heavy makeup of the kind that is used to cover port-wine birthmarks, and we spent the afternoon trying to cover up the damage. With a pair of sunglasses he explained by saying he had retina problems, which at one time he actually had, he could almost get away with it. At least nobody wrote about it; whether or not they talked, I couldn’t say.

  The world congress was a contentious gathering. Norman had invited George P. Shultz, the secretary of state, to welcome the attendees, which infuriated a lot of the left-leaning members of PEN, and to our horror Shultz was booed when he rose to speak. The State Department had let every single writer, without question, into the country to attend the congress, and the disrespect for Shultz and the office was embarrassing. Then, while Norman was speaking, Betty Friedan staged a protest about the number of women writers who were there. Ironic, because at the time, PEN was one of the few organizations that had more women running it than men. Six of the eight PEN committees were headed by women. In fact, PEN had invited dozens of leading international women writers, but forty-four had declined. The organization couldn’t just go out into the streets and drag women there. I was furious at Friedan’s phony rant. But Norman, instead of explaining these facts and figures to the audience, only got exasperated and said, “Oh, come on, Betty. Don’t play the numbers game.” He might as well have lain down on the railroad track and invited the train to run over him. The congress became a huge controversy. There was a faction of PEN who were unhappy that Norman had gotten the wealthy socialites involved, even though now PEN had the money to do a lot more good, and in fact, PEN became a world force. Articles were written for Norman and against him. There was a movement to have him removed from office, which ultimately failed. After his death in November 2007, PEN honored Norman for his past efforts at their annual fund-raiser, and invited John Buffalo and me. I noticed some of the ones who’d complained the loudest at the time were there at the dinner to recognize Norman’s contributions. I just wish Norman had been alive to see it.

  WITH THE CONGRESS OVER, Norman returned his attentions to the movie. Summer of 1986 was spent in Provincetown with the kids, but Norman was distracted with preproduction. I still went grocery shopping, and cooked dinner every night for as many as a dozen people, and life was more or less normal, but things weren’t the same at all in our marriage. I could feel Norman pulling farther away from me. While we still had a good sex life, I began to wonder if there might be someone else. I had a vivid dream about him leaving me for another woman, and when I talked to him about it and asked him point-blank if he was having an affair, he told me I was crazy, that there was no one else but me, there had never been anyone but me since we’d met, and he was just distracted with the movie. He convinced me I was imagining things. He was good at that. But he had been distracted for more than a year, first with the PEN congress and now the movie.

  They were going to film in our house, so after the summer, the movie crew swooped in and put everything into storage, and the house was transformed into one belonging to a whipped-cream blonde. Every room was painted a different pastel Easter egg color, and our dark wood floors were sanded and pickled white. I came in one day to find that they had taken a little soft-green wicker table and chair I particularly liked and spray-painted them banana-yellow. They had promised they wouldn’t use our things, but when I complained, they said the director had okayed it. I gave up and went home.

  Back in New York, I played single mom and still went to social engagements, commandeering Michael as my escort when he was home from Harvard. Occasionally I would go up to Ptown for a weekend and bring Matt and John, who loved hanging around the movie set. Matt was fifteen, John was nine, and they both wanted to be filmmakers. Norman was good about letting them watch everything, and Matt particularly loved special effects and learned a lot from that department. Later, when he was at York Prep, he made a movie called The Deranged, in which a severed head, much like the severed heads in Tough Guys, figured; it was realistically ghastly. (Matt’s workshop was in our basement, and the woman who lived on the first floor once got the bedoodle scared out of her when she went down to fix a fuse or something and climbed up in the dark onto a bench that had a desiccated corpse Matt was making for a film lying on it.)

  John used to sit on his father’s knee, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, while Norman directed a shot, and he learned every scene word for word. He would make us howl with laughter by doing all the dialogue with the perfect accents of the actors, like John Bedford Lloyd, who played Wardley Meeks, a Southern rich boy: “Wheah is mah money? Who HAS mah money?” We knew then that, at the very least, John was going to be an actor. I mostly just hung around the edges and watched, feeling far out of it. I was friendly with, but didn’t really know, the crew and cast, who had formed a family bond, as they always do. I was just the wife of the director, always in the way of the shot.

  We spent Thanksgiving in Provincetown, with a big turkey dinner for everyone. Farrah Fawcett came to be with Ryan O’Neal, and Ryan’s sons Patrick and Griffin were there. Back in May that year, Griffin had tragically caused the death of Gian-Carlo Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola’s son, when he’d run a speedboat between two boats, not noticing they were attached by a wire, and the wire had hit Gian-Carlo. Griffin had been on drugs at the time. Griffin had also recently gotten into a fistfight with his father, who had knocked one of his front teeth out. (Ryan was a boxer on a nearly professional level, and he used to do it on the weekends with Norman’s little boxing club at the Gramercy Gym. He once broke the jaw of one of the inexperienced guys. Ryan was considered lethal.)

  At Thanksgiving, Griffin was a bit of a mess, it seemed; he might have just come out of rehab, I’m not sure. Maggie was with us, and the two of them struck up an unlikely friendship that made us all nervous, but it was fortunately just an innocent flirtation. Maggie at fifteen was beautiful with dark curly hair and big blue eyes, but was unworldly, to say the least. Curious, Norman asked her what she and Griffin talked about, and she answered, “Our families. He’s so much like me. He understands me,” which made Norman and me stare at each other in bewilderment and dismay.

  The movie was done shooting by December 14, and Norman came back to Brooklyn. It was hard for him to come down from the excitement of the movie, but I was glad to be with him again, and the kids were thrilled to have him home. I was hopeful that now that he had finished shooting the movie, we would go back to being as we were before, but there was something wrong, I could feel it. It was a lot of small things a woman can sense, like when a famous photographer came to take his picture and she asked to take one of the two of us, he refused to have his picture taken with me and got annoyed when I protested. He was still going away quite a bit, too, doing postproduction things for the movie, and again I felt like a social widow, going to dinners alone, or with Michael, or staying home. People were beginning to wonder why I was always by myself, was anything wrong, and I would reply to their questions that things were fine, Norman was away working. But in my heart I knew better.

  We had a big Christmas, as we always did, then I went to Arkansas to be with my father, who was having open-heart surgery. After his heart attack several years earlier and a few smaller procedures, he had kept on working, teaching heavy equipment operation to underprivileged kids through Job Corps in Cass, Arkansas. But now he’d had another heart a
ttack, and the doctors told us if he didn’t have quadruple bypass surgery, he would die. He had no insurance, and he was too young for Medicare, so he went to the veterans’ hospital. His surgeon was only a senior resident, which made me a little nervous, but the doctor, I’ll call him Benicio, convinced us he made up for his lack of experience with youth, agility, and the latest knowledge, or so we hoped, and the operation was a success. My father got better every day; we brought him good food from home. Benicio had said he could eat anything he wanted until he got his strength back, and what he wanted was pinto beans and corn bread. At any rate, at midnight on New Year’s eve, I was in the hospital with my father. My mother and I were spending our nights in the waiting room sleeping on lounge chairs. She was asleep, so I tiptoed out and called Norman at midnight to wish him a happy New Year. He was having a small party at the apartment in Brooklyn. Laughter and merrymaking racketed in the background. We said “Happy New Year” and “I love you,” but he felt far away.