Benicio was on the floor checking patients. We had become friends during the week, since he stopped in to see my father frequently, and we sometimes had lunch together. It had been one of those odd occurrences when we’d met, as if we had known each other in a past life. As I hung up the phone from my call with Norman, Benicio could see I was upset, and we went down to the cafeteria for coffee. I began to pour my heart out to him about Norman, how he kept pushing me away and how he didn’t really even live in New York anymore. He was staying in Provincetown most of the year. I was afraid he was having an affair, and it felt like my life was coming apart. Of course Benicio was sympathetic. And extremely handsome. Before I quite knew what was happening, I had gone with him back to his place. No mea culpa; it was great. It was so wonderful to have someone who really wanted me, even if it was only for a little while. And if Norman was having an affair, I could tell him I was, too.
My father got better, and after we got him settled at home, I went back to New York. Just as I came back, Norman left again, this time for San Francisco for a month to do postproduction sound for the movie. After a couple of weeks, John and I went out to visit him. We had a great time traveling around San Francisco, just John and me, while Norman worked. We went to Fisherman’s Wharf and did all the tourist things like the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum with its shrunken heads, and we rode the carousel and got our pictures taken in old-fashioned clothing.
Norman and I gave a cocktail party for the movie crew at his rented apartment, which had sweeping views of the bay and Alcatraz, and Norman let John be the bartender, standing on a box behind the kitchen counter. The first drink order he got was for a screwdriver. John knew it was made with orange juice but wasn’t sure what the other part was. He didn’t want to seem ignorant and ask, heaven forbid, so he just nonchalantly made it with beer. The man sputtered and spit it out onto the floor, and Norman gave John a quick lesson in bartending. How many kids can say their father taught them to bartend at nine? “Really,” as Kate once said, “when Norman Mailer is your father, how are you going to rebel?”
But there were clues in San Francisco that things were still wrong. One day I came back to the apartment unexpectedly to find an old girlfriend of Norman’s leaving. He swore nothing had happened, and I even believed him, but I found a hair clip in the bathroom, just the kind of thing a woman does who wants the wife to know she has been in her territory. I asked him point-blank if he was having an affair, if not with this woman, then with anybody. He swore he wasn’t. I broke down and told him about my little fling with the doctor, thinking it would encourage him to come clean, and while he was hurt, he still adamantly insisted he wasn’t having an affair. At least the air was cleared for me. I was never good at lying or hiding things. Of course I told Norman it was over and I would never see Benicio again, that I had just felt so abandoned, so alone. Norman held me and told me he loved me and wanted our marriage to work. I wasn’t totally convinced.
The movie was done, and we took it to Cannes in the spring of 1987, where it was screened outside of competition. Norman was also a judge that year, so it was an exciting week for us. At last I felt like I was part of the movie, and met a lot of stars. He seemed proud to be with me, we had a good time, and I thought things might be getting back to normal. Benicio called me from time to time, and while we were fond of each other, we knew there was no way we would ever be together. He had a girlfriend, and I really wanted to make my marriage work.
The movie opened in September in the States, to wildly mixed reviews. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. It was nominated for four awards at the Independent Spirit Awards and seven at the Golden Raspberry Awards (the Razzies). Norman won a Razzie for worst director, tying with Elaine May for Ishtar. Tough Guys was beautifully shot, thanks to John Bailey, who got one of the nominations for best cinematography, but nobody could figure out what the movie was trying to do, or even what it was. Was it a comedy or a thriller? People laughed when they should have been scared. They were befuddled when they should have been laughing. There were comments that ranged from The Washington Post’s “hard to classify; at times you laugh raucously at what’s up on the screen, at others you stare dumbly, in stunned amazement” to the Chicago Reader’s somewhat kinder “He translates his macho preoccupations (existential tests of bravado, good orgasms, murderous women, metaphysical cops) into an odd, campy, raunchy, comedy-thriller that remains consistently watchable and unpredictable—as goofy in a way as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
It closed soon after it opened. Nobody took it seriously, and lines like “Oh man, oh God, oh man, oh God, oh man, oh God, oh shit and shinola,” which Ryan O’Neal had to say when he found out his wife was having an affair with the police chief, were repeated with delighted incredulity. Ryan just wanted to pretend he hadn’t done the movie. In truth, everyone had tried to get Norman to take the “Oh man, oh God” line out, including me, which I regretted because it seemed that whatever I suggested strengthened his determination to do the exact opposite, so I felt responsible in a way for the line staying in.
There were also inadvertently funny lines, such as, “I just deep-sixed two heads,” said by Lawrence Tierney, a grand old B-movie gangster who played Dougy Madden, Ryan O’Neal’s character’s father, after he took the severed heads out to sea. There was a weird scene where Wings Hauser, who played the chief of police and the bad guy, has a stroke, and then recites long minutes of strange dialogue through a twisted mouth to his wife, Madeleine, played by Isabella Rossellini: “Patty Lareine was big time. Ooh, la, la! I thought you were big time, but you were nothing but small potatoes.” Of course, Isabella then shoots and kills him, as anybody would, and Dougy, who was listening outside the door, says to Ryan’s character, Tim, “I could’ve told him. You never call an Italian small potatoes.” It was painful to watch.
Still, it hurt me when the reviewers were nasty to Norman, in spite of the fact that I secretly agreed with a lot of what they said. Norman was such a little boy at times. He never gave up his wonder at life, his belief in the essential goodness of the world, nor his expectation that this time they would really like what he had done. The Naked and the Dead, after all, was his first foray into public love, and it made him an eternal optimist.
We were invited to take the movie to the Cuban Film Festival in 1989. At that time, there were no scheduled flights to Cuba. Americans weren’t supposed to go, and if they somehow did go, they weren’t supposed to spend any money. We traveled with Tom Luddy, the producer of Tough Guys, and Leonard Michaels, a fine writer who wrote a book called The Men’s Club. We were greeted at the airport in Havana by a gang of friendly writers and filmmakers who put mojitos into our hands. The Cuban government put us all up in a protocol house, once owned by a rich businessman. Nothing in the house had been changed since 1959, when the guy had left in the middle of the night for Miami. It was made of cool concrete blocks, with gray linoleum floors and louvered doors to catch a breeze. In the back garden, there was a small kidney-shaped swimming pool they made a point of telling us they had filled just for us, and a nice metal-and-glass patio set, all straight out of the fifties. We had an ancient Mercedes and a driver who took us everywhere we wanted to go. We had our own chef, who cooked more food at one meal, I suspect, than the average Cuban had all week, but we ate everything, not to appear ungrateful or wasteful.
Tom had brought a shortwave radio along, and we sat out in the garden and listened to Radio Moscow. Tom said how ironic it was that Radio Moscow now provided real news while Cuba still did not. On the radio they were talking about the death of the physicist Sakharov and saying that Russia had lost one of its great patriots. This was thanks to Gorbachev, whom I admired greatly. Only a few years before, the USSR would have branded Sakharov a dissident or an imperialist agent.
Pablo Armando Fernandez, a well-known poet, became our best friend and guide, and we met several other writers, all of whom lived in shabby but genteel homes, surrounded by books and friends. They
seemed to be able to criticize the government in conversation, but I doubt they would have been allowed to write and publish the things they were saying.
Norman, me, and Pablo Armando Fernandez.
Havana was beautiful; the vibrant colors of the buildings had long ago faded to soft rain-washed blues and corals and gold. The sun shone every day; the sea was a choppy indigo blue on the other side of the Malecon, a four-mile-long seawall on Havana Harbor; and the streets were full of people who seemed happy. Or at least people who knew the value of a laugh. Rows of schoolchildren in red-and-white uniforms ambled along, and they all smiled and wanted us to take their picture. There were also children in the tattered uniform of the street urchin—shorts and T-shirts with bare feet—to whom we gave packs of gum and candy and ballpoint pens, and they all wanted us to hire them to be our guides. I struck up a conversation with a man who spent his days selling cotton candy and beachcombing, who had a cotton candy cart covered with the detritus of the United States, naked rubber dolls with blond matted hair, plastic cartoon characters, baby pacifiers, soda bottles, and other exotic junk that had floated the ninety miles across the sea—his treasures.
We went to the bars where Hemingway had drunk, El Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio, which had the best mojitos. We visited Hemingway’s house itself, the Finca, and were allowed to go inside and roam around, a treat that was not allowed to the general public. It was just as though Ernest had stepped out for a moment to take a dip in the pool: he had left his glasses beside a sheet of paper on a tall writing table in his bedroom, where he’d worked standing up. There was his scale and the chart where he recorded his weight every morning. We looked at his bookshelves, but didn’t see any of Norman’s books.
“When The Deer Park came out, I sent it to Hemingway, hoping for twenty good words to use for a blurb, which might have meant the difference in a half success or a breakthrough. But I was also angry at myself for begging, so I put a rude inscription in it.”
“Did he read it?” I asked.
“Ten days later it was returned in the same package, never opened. It was stamped ‘Address Unknown.’ But later I got a letter from him. It seems he went out and bought a copy, and said he liked it and it didn’t deserve the shitty reviews.”
Norman and Hemingway never met. George Plimpton almost arranged a meeting in New York shortly after Advertisements for Myself was published, but after Norman waited around all day by the telephone, with George calling every hour or so with bulletins, Hemingway never saw him. It was a little sad, seeing Norman poking about in Hemingway’s house, wondering what they might have said to each other if they had indeed ever met. Kind of like the phantom affair he might have had with Marilyn Monroe, if they had ever met, which they didn’t.
Norman in the Hemingway house.
PABLO ARMANDO TOOK Tom, Len, Norman, and me to the country outside Havana, where we joined a throng of three thousand people who were making a pilgrimage to a small church in El Rincon. It was the festival of Saint Lazarus, who was also known as Babalu Aye, the saint of healing in the Santeria religion. The night was dark, but every pilgrim carried a candle, bought from vendors who lined the road also selling statues of saints, plates of fried rice and plantains, or spaghetti. The smell of good cigar smoke wafted through the air. I’d worn the wrong shoes, a pair of woven leather flats that got wet and stretched so much that they flopped up and down on my heels, causing blisters. I fervently wished for a Band-Aid, but my discomfort was nothing compared to the pain of the penitents, who were crawling the three miles alongside us, some with cinder blocks wired to their ankles, to honor Saint Lazarus, so I didn’t complain.
Castro had only a year or two earlier built a camp for people with AIDS. They were shipped there as soon as they were diagnosed, in hopes of containing the spread of the disease. We passed by it, a tall fence with dozens of people pressed against the wire, holding candles, shouting out to us. We stopped and touched their outstretched hands, hoping to at least give them a little human contact, as we could offer nothing else. It was so poignant, looking through the fence at the big eyes of people who didn’t know what was going to befall them. All of us were crying. But we had to leave them, and on we went, marching toward El Rincon, my shoes flapping, the penitents doggedly crawling beside us.
When we finally got there, I was dismayed to see what a tiny church it was. Double doors stood open and a steady stream of people climbed the steps, inched into the front and out the back. In the middle of the church, priests were up on a platform, flinging holy water out over the crowd. There was no way I was going to go into that swarm of people. I am claustrophobic and don’t do well with crowds. But Norman, Len, and Tom wanted to go, so I said I would wait right outside and they should come and find me when they came out. They plunged into the maelstrom, as if diving into a boiling stream, and as they started to climb the concrete steps leading to the doors, Tom suddenly was squirted, it seemed, out of the crowd and fell onto the grass beside the steps. I ran over to him and he was okay, but not up to trying it again. “I saw Norman go in,” he said, rubbing his head, “and I don’t think his feet were even touching the ground. The crowd was just carrying him along.”
I began to really worry. Norman wasn’t tall. If he fell, he might not be noticed until the crowd had tromped him underfoot. We watched the back door, and there was no Norman coming out. Len joined us, but hadn’t seen him, either. We waited and waited. He was nowhere. I pictured the headlines, “Novelist Stomped to Death in Voodoo Ritual!” Then, just as I was deciding to panic, here he came. “I had to crawl out the window,” he said. “I couldn’t get to the door.” He was exhilarated. It had been a fine adventure.
We packed a lot into that trip. We spent an afternoon with Gabriel García Márquez and his wife at their house; Norman went to the Bay of Pigs and checked it out for the book he was writing, Harlot’s Ghost, and we went to a club and heard Arturo Sandoval, one of the most famous trumpet players in Cuba, who did a Miles Davis and played with his back to the crowd.
The night after our Saint Lazarus experience, we were invited to a reception for the film festival, where Fidel Castro would be present. Norman had always admired him because of his daring to take over a country with just a few ragged troops, and his success in keeping it. Norman always had the fantasy that if he could just talk to Fidel, he could convince him of the error of his ways with Communism, and history would be changed. Now he had the chance. I was impressed with Castro in spite of myself. He was bigger than I’d realized, handsome in his dress uniform, and blessed with the same magnetism that world leaders all seemed to possess. It appears that kind of charisma is a prerequisite to become a world leader. Without it, you might just as well study to become a CPA or whatever.
We were introduced to Fidel, and then we were led over to four chairs at the side of the room. Fidel sat in one, I was seated across from him, Norman was to his right, and the translator was across from Norman. It was a little odd, as there was no table, just the four of us facing one another, but the conversation began, with Fidel speaking in Spanish, looking directly at me, while the translator looked at Norman and translated. Norman spoke to Fidel, who answered him by looking at me, and I sat there not saying a word. It was enough to be able to keep my seat, with that powerful rhetoric I couldn’t understand and those dark eyes looking directly into mine. Fidel brought up the Saint Lazarus ceremony as an example of the religious freedom they had in Cuba, and he was surprised when we told him we had been there.
Norman was trying to convince him to come to America and speak directly to the American people, hoping that relations between our countries would turn around if they could meet him, hear him directly, and know who he really was instead of what the American government wanted them to know. Fidel said he would be happy to come, but no one had invited him, and therefore who was going to pay for the security? That was a problem Norman hadn’t thought about. Of course it would cost millions in security alone, not to mention, where would he s
tay? Who would be responsible for arranging his schedule? I can imagine the look on the secretary’s face when someone from Fidel’s office called the White House and said, “Norman Mailer has invited President Castro to come to America and talk to the people, so he will be arriving next Thursday.…” No. I don’t think that would be practical. Still, they had a great, animated discussion, with Fidel doing a lot of the talking. He did speak a small amount of English, and he told me later that the next time we came, he would invite us to his house and cook for us. Of course we never made it back.
Me, Norman, Fidel Castro, and translator.
The showing of the film at the festival was almost anticlimactic, but it was nice for Norman to once again be the center of attention with his movie. I wish it had been more successful. I wish I had truly liked it, but making that movie was probably one of the best times of Norman’s life, and I can’t begrudge him that. Even if I was not a real part of it.
When we left, I cleaned out my suitcase of all my hats, scarves, deodorants, lotions, makeup, and toiletries and gave them to the girls who cleaned our house and took care of us. They were so thrilled, even at the half-squeezed-out tube of toothpaste. They never got a chance to buy those things. If I had known the situation, I would have brought over a lot more. It made me so angry to think of how the United States government was starving that poor little island, and forbidding anyone else in the world to do business with them, either, while they were trading like bandits with China and every other Communist country in the world. Somehow, it had to change. The people were courageous, but they were paying a high price for politics that went back fifty years, someone else’s politics, started before most of them were even born.
A Ticket to the Circus Page 32