Shortly after he finished “Superman,” he heard that Capote was working on a new book about the savage murder of a family on a Kansas farm the previous fall. In Cold Blood, published first in 1965 in The New Yorker, and the following year as a book, would have a strong influence on Mailer. “I hate you for writing about murder,” he wrote to Capote, “I thought that was my province.” He didn’t say that the big novel he was preparing himself to write was also about a murder. All he said was that it was too late in the summer to make a big push on it. He added that he was trying to close a deal on a five-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights not far from Capote’s apartment, and if it happened, “the possibility suggests itself to light a candle every night for Senor Capote, our peripatetic Truman.” The Brooklyn house didn’t work out at that time. Instead, the Mailers began renting a fairly large apartment at 250 West 94th Street, thirteenth floor.
They learned about the apartment from Harold L. “Doc” Humes, who lived in the same building. A writer, activist, provocateur, and devoted marijuana smoker, Humes was one of the founders of The Paris Review, and a legendary figure in the hip world. He had written a brilliant novel, The Underground City, and in the fall of 1960 founded the Citizens’ Emergency Committee in response to the plight of an eccentric comic, Richard “Lord” Buckley, whose permit to perform had been rescinded. Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, among many others, had also been denied permits. Mailer, who was still involved with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, signed on with Humes’s committee, whose efforts ultimately led to the resignation of the police commissioner, and several years later the dismantling of the cabaret permit system. He began spending a lot of time with Humes, whom he later described as “one of the few people I have ever met, who was essentially, at bottom, more vain, more intellectually arrogant than I am.” The success of “Superman” made him fantasize about becoming a member of Kennedy’s kitchen cabinet. “I wanted to be an advisor,” he said in 1999. “I felt that, you know, I might have a certain talent for it.” At that time, he said,
I realized that life, in its imminence, in its presence, in its resonance, once you could feel it, was extraordinary, and that we were all living like cockroaches, scurrying here and there and not having that life. And so that became, if you will, my sermon. That was what I was preaching for the next 10-15-20 years: let’s get back to the instinctive life. Let’s get back to where we can feel what’s going on in ourselves. And I felt that President Kennedy, and his wife, precisely because of their youth and their good looks, were going to encourage—willy-nilly, whether they chose to or not—an opening in America, a return more to the pagan, to the sense of oneself as an animal who lived in a field of senses.
Kennedy owed him some gratitude, Mailer felt, and in recompense, he wanted “some drinks and dinner and a chance to preach to the President.” He was certain he could help Kennedy understand the country better, and perhaps he could become his confidant.
Mailer had his own confidant—Doc Humes—and that fall they were discussing the possibility of Mailer running for mayor of New York on “the existentialist ticket.” Humes would be his campaign manager. Humes recalled that Mailer “was grim-faced every day. He wasn’t sleeping well, he was using a lot of Demerol and alcohol, and he had collateral worries about his work.” He wanted to lead New York, while calling it “this insane, cruel, rapacious, avid, cancerous and alas—in the end—cowardly city.” New York was certainly having an effect on him, according to Humes: “I think he even described it once as a Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde type of thing, with the city driving him mad.” Others noticed how he changed when he returned from the country or Provincetown. Pleased as he was about his piece in Esquire, he was infuriated when the magazine’s publisher, Arnold Gingrich, decided to change the final word of the title from “Supermarket” to “Supermart.” When Mailer saw the change on his contract, he told Felker to make the restoration, and Felker said he would, but didn’t. Consequently, Mailer instructed Rembar to ensure that his future contracts specify that no changes could be made to magazine pieces, including titles, without his permission. Then he wrote a letter to the editors at Esquire, detailing his complaints and ended, “You print nice stuff, but you gotta treat the hot writer right or you lose him like you just lost me. When I’m mayor, I’ll pay you a visit and see if you’ve cleaned the stable.” In later years, whenever he autographed copies of the essay in the magazine, he always carefully restored the original title by hand. Reasonable people can debate which title is slightly more euphonious.
AFTER DISCUSSIONS WITH friends and family in late October, Mailer began his public campaign for mayor with a flurry of letters. He asked for the support of comedian, writer, and musician Steve Allen, with whom he had become friendly; liberal columnist Murray Kempton, whose idiosyncratic style he admired; Seymour Krim, who had written him about reaching out to New York Catholics and Jews; and Karl Edd, the author of a banned book, The Tenement Kid. He asked Edd for the names of “some very hard hip kids” to work in the campaign, and told Krim that he needed public relations professionals who would work for nothing. The kind of people he hoped to attract, he explained to Allen, were people who had “evolved a private philosophy which will have perhaps some point of possible communion with my own.” He told his German publisher he had no time to answer questions because “it is necessary to start a new political party in America,” and agreed to do an interview with Mademoiselle on the condition that it be a discussion of politics. He did respond positively, however, to Allen Ginsberg’s request for a testimonial for William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which he had now read. For the Grove Press edition, he wrote, “Naked Lunch is a book of great beauty, great difficulty, and maniacally exquisite insight. I think William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius. And I make these remarks in sourness and without enthusiasm, since Mr. Burroughs, after all, is one of my fellow racketeers. But I don’t know that we belong to the same part of the literary Mafia.” The second sentence of the blurb continues to appear on editions of Burroughs’s novel.
On the campaign trail, Kennedy was talking about the possibility of sending a volunteer force to Cuba to challenge Castro, and Mailer was sufficiently disturbed to write a note to Schlesinger saying that such an operation would be “tragic,” and Kennedy might “lose more than he will gain from this” in the election. He also said no to a request to use his name on a national advertisement sent to him from the National Committee of Arts, Letters and Sciences for John F. Kennedy for President. “Kennedy’s Wagnerian vision of a new American expeditionary force captained by Saint Grottlesexers and soldiered by some yet undefined Marine corps lumpen proletariat for the invasion of Cuba,” he wrote, was “chilling” and he hoped it was only “a perhaps forgivable mistake due to the excesses of campaigning.”
NOT ALL OF his letters were as reasonable as these. In undated letters written around election day to four writers, there are signs, at least in retrospect, that the fears of his wife and sister about his mental state were justified. The letters are to pitcher Jim Brosnan, author of professional baseball’s first unsanitized memoir, The Long Season; John Cheever, who had a fine story, “The Death of Justina,” in the same issue of Esquire as “Superman”; Stephen Spender, the literary editor of Encounter, a highbrow British magazine, where Mailer had sent “Superman” in the hopes of publication; and T. S. Eliot. Spender was the only one that Mailer knew personally. Following are a few lines from the first three, and the whole of his letter to Eliot:
To Brosnan: “I can’t pitch worth a fuck, and you write like a dull whore with an honest streak, but if you ain’t afraid of a grand slam, which you is, come around when you get to the New York, and we’ll have a drink or two—you to beer and small Martinis, me to . . . B, not Bourbon, but blended Bellows, if that’s not bragging too hard. Your new pal Fan letter Mailer (First name Norm)”
To Cheever: “For its length it’s an extraordinary story, not alto
gether alienated (?) from a great literature but . . . you did . . . cowardly thing—you kept the children from seeing the dead woman—thus depriving me of their reactions. Yet one does write a letter. Your tablemate, Norman Mailer”
To Spender: “I have a hide like a Bantu flunky but you might recognize the subtle bit that I found you one of the few people who were at bottom not wholly detestable. So not hearing from you it was sad to think that Mailer, the punch-drunk clunk is wrong again. Norman”
Mailer was trying to convince André Deutsch, his publisher in England, to include “The Time of Her Time” in the edition of Advertisements for Myself to be published there. He hoped that Eliot, after reading that Denise Gondelman believed that the poet “was the apotheosis of manner” would endorse its inclusion. To Eliot:
If he [Eliot] comes out with words for The Time of Her Time, I will force my publisher to print or have nothing further to do with him. Self educated gentleman, I will swear a vow on what is important to me that I will not use his letter in any way without the perfectionist permission of his ecclesiastical Name.
Prince Mailer the Norman of Principath to T. S. Lord King of Eliot, Impervious to Compassion, Blind by Pride, Timid as Temerity, Royal as a Royal Roach who has Earned his Place which is High. Spirit of Denial and Quick Withdrawal I, hereby, as Norman, do challenge your inflexible taste by presenting the fruits of my orchard and the war of my castle. Do answer. No answer is war, and one would detest that. Mailer.
It is unlikely that these letters were sent, but it is clear that he was less and less able to bridle his irrationality. The struggle between the saint and the psychopath was challenging the navigator’s abilities.
In his reply to Mrs. Kennedy before the election, he responded to her comment about how incredible it would be if he could somehow visit earlier centuries and write reports in the manner of “Superman.” Mailer said he would enjoy talking with her in Hyannis Port about his interest in the late-eighteenth-century France. Specifically, he would like to discuss the works of the Marquis de Sade. “There’s a man I’d like to do a biography of when I’m dead beyond repair. I might be able to throw a hint or two on the odd strong honor of the man.” His balance can be gauged by his feeling that Mrs. Kennedy would naturally be delighted to discuss de Sade’s thought as “a fair climax to the Age of Reason.” Not surprisingly, she did not reply. Much later, he deduced that he had “smashed the limits of such letter-writing,” and trod “as close to the edge as I have ever come.” But at the time, “I saw it somewhat differently. The odds were against a reply, I decided, three-to-one against, or eight-to-one against. I did not glean that they were eight-hundred-to-one against. It is the small inability to handicap odds which is family to the romantic, the desperate and the insane.”
Two days after he wrote to Mrs. Kennedy, Mailer called a meeting to discuss his candidacy with Irving Howe and a half dozen Dissent writers and editors. Mailer opened it by saying he wanted to be mayor “to establish New York as the West Berlin of the world.” He called for an existential campaign. He then read his “Open Letter to Fidel Castro” and said that if it was published and Castro responded positively and Hemingway agreed to write an assessment of the Cuban Revolution, voters would get the sense that “New York can be a force in the world.” Howe said that the Cuban situation was no way to start a New York mayoral campaign, especially a third party campaign. The meeting ended after a desultory discussion of a name for the new party.
According to his sister, he was surly and difficult in the fall of 1960. One afternoon she came to the 94th Street apartment to deliver something she had typed for him in connection with the mayoral campaign. He found fault with it and said she was trying to sabotage him. They argued and, then, she recalled, “He actually hit me across the side of my face. Broke my glasses. He was very upset. Oh, God, it was a terrible time.” Adele was present and remembers Barbara crying and saying to her brother, “What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?” and then leaving. Barbara now believes that Mailer had gotten fascinated with political power when he went to the Democratic convention. “I think he really felt that if I can’t change the world with my writing, I can change it if I get some power, some political power.” He wasn’t merely angry with her, she said, he was angry with his entire family: “He felt that the Kennedys all pulled together, and his family wasn’t doing this for him. I wasn’t happy at all about his running for mayor. Thought it was a terrible idea.” A decade later, Mailer said he was in complete earnest at the time. “I thought I was unique; that I had a unique mission. I had something to do in the world.” When the two women spoke the next day, Barbara said, “I’ve never seen him like this.” Adele replied, “Well I have, and it’s getting worse.”
His descent began to accelerate. On November 14, he was arrested at Birdland, a fancy jazz club in Midtown Manhattan. He insisted on paying a bar bill with a credit card, although the law forbade alcohol purchases on credit at the time. He spent the night in jail. The next afternoon he was cordial during his interview with two young women from Mademoiselle. Most of their discussion was given over to the issues raised in “The White Negro” and “Superman.” Mailer said Kennedy was a hipster, and that he was as well, but a “terribly philosophical” one. He wasn’t about to recommend hipsterism to everyone, he said. “I just ask that the hipster be considered at least as interesting and serious as a young congressman.” Mailer admitted to still taking an occasional toke, but found that it was affecting his short-term memory. When the discussion turned to writers, he praised Burroughs. “I think he’s going to last a long time after me because he’s more intense. He’s got a quality I don’t have. I mean, I write sentences that embrace people. But he writes sentences that stab people and you never forget the man who stabs you.” Indeed.
Mailer was tired after spending the previous night in jail, but nevertheless spent the evening drinking with his Provincetown friends, Lester Blackiston and Bill Ward, at the Cedar Tavern in the Village. He got to bed at six A.M. (We know the specifics of his life for the next three weeks because of a rough diary he kept from November 15 through December 8.) The next afternoon he had a mayoral planning meeting at Downey’s Steakhouse in Manhattan with some friends, including Seymour Krim, who along with Allen Ginsberg and Noel Parmentel Jr. (credited with coming up with the famous line about Nixon, “Would you buy a used car from this man?”), were named informal press secretaries for the campaign. He returned to 94th Street for a meeting with Doc Humes and the Citizens’ Emergency Committee.
The following day, November 17, Mailer took the train to Providence to give a reading at Brown University. According to an account by Brown student reporter Richard Holbrooke, he began his presentation announcing, “I come to bring you the existentialist word” (five years later, Mailer said that at the time, “I thought I had God’s message”). Another reporter, Ellen Shaffer, wrote: “The audiences were at once alienated by this brusque man, and having lost his audience, Mailer never regained it.” He read from his work, and “his voice swelled with each obscenity, and he made lewd gestures to aid his re-enactment of the scene.” A few members of the audience walked out; others applauded. She concluded: “Norman Mailer is an egocentric, malcontent genius, who has courageously, indignantly come to blows with the world around him.” Holbrooke ends his report with Mailer in quiet dialogue about various writers after the reading. “Fitzgerald,” Mailer said, “pissed away his talent,” and Farrell is “as great as Beckett.” Mailer’s notes sketch the rest of the evening: “Drinks at Ginger Chivvies (?), Freddy candy (?) man and punch he caught for me, going outside—Chinnie Thibault looking for WPRO, splitting with him and Reis, car-ride out for girl, no-find, eating in a spade joint, near rumble, split-out onto street, back to hotel, chinfest with Reis, sleep.”
The next day he met his sister at his apartment. They had a fight about the preparations for the thirtieth birthday party he was giving Roger Donoghue on November 19. Mailer planned to make an informal statement at the p
arty that he was running for mayor; a formal announcement would be made a few days later at a press conference. The Donoghues came by for drinks in the late afternoon, and then they all went to the Stork Club for more. After dinner, he went home and took Tibo for a walk, and the dog ran away. Chasing him, Mailer got into a fight with a “prep school type.” He went to bed in the early morning hours.
In the morning, he was “ego-dampened by fatigue.” Mickey Knox and Doc Humes’s wife, Anna Lou, came by for campaign assignments. After they left, he had an argument with Adele. Then he got on the telephone to invite last-minute guests. George Plimpton, who was helping him, later said that Mailer called him several times that day. His idea, Plimpton said, was that “he was truly suited to represent the disenfranchised of the city . . . and if he could convince this marginal if large group that he had solid connections with the ‘power structure’ of New York City, he’d get their support.” Dutifully, all afternoon, Plimpton made calls to various dignitaries, including the fire commissioner, police commissioner, David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank, and Sadruddin Aga Khan, the publisher of The Paris Review. But the only society representative Plimpton convinced to attend was Peter Duchin, the bandleader.
A heavy load of booze was delivered in the late afternoon and Adele, with the help of their maid, Nettie Biddle, was busy preparing food. C. Wright Mills, the sociologist, came early, as did various street people Mailer had invited. There were many crashers. The party was roaring by ten P.M. Plimpton remembered seeing a man wrapped in bandages and was told he was a victim of police brutality. Tony Franciosa, a film star, was at the party. Mailer knew him through his old friend Shelley Winters, who had divorced Franciosa the day before. He was the closest thing to a major celebrity who attended. Several close friends and family members were there. Estimates of the number of guests average around two hundred.
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