Mickey Knox, who thought he had seen the full spectrum of his friend’s moods, said that Mailer “was in a strange zone.” He paced through the apartment, “taut as a cat,” giving his greetings. He had drunk a lot and smoked marijuana, and soon got into arguments about the campaign. He also tried to stare people down. “It was a spooky evening,” Doc Humes recalled. “It was exactly the kind of atmosphere that Norman in his state should have avoided.” Allen Ginsberg, usually the mildest of men, got into a shouting match with Norman Podhoretz. According to Ginsberg, Podhoretz was patronizing, telling him the only way he could gain entrée into the larger literary world was by breaking with the Beats. “To my eternal shame,” Ginsberg recalled, “I lost my temper” and began screaming at Podhoretz. Mailer was called and Ginsberg assured him that he wasn’t going to get violent. Ginsberg saw that he was making a scary party worse, so he left, riding down in the elevator with C. Wright Mills.
Scuffles kept breaking out as the party wore on. Larry Alson, Barbara’s first husband, remembers that people kept challenging Mailer to a fight. When book editor Jason Epstein arrived, Mailer tried to box with him. “I don’t know anything about boxing,” Epstein said, “so I just held out my hand as if to make him go away. I didn’t touch him, and he fell over.” Mailer went down to the street several times for fights, according to his notes, once with a man named Curran: “Punch at Plimpton’s belly—P’s counter to chin, chasing Duchin and P to cab. Fighting Curran. Taking punishment—holding on—draw. Curran getting into cab—ask him to tell accurate version—gets out, new fight, lands on ground, me astride—he squeezing, me up—finally wanes—goes home. Puerto Rican wants to fight. I shame him.” Podhoretz summed it up: “There was a lot of bad feelings in the air, most of it emanating from Norman.”
Around three A.M. there were about twenty people left. In his drunken state, Mailer announced he was dividing them into two groups: supporters and enemies. He judged each person; most were found wanting, including Adele. Nettie the maid, he kept saying, was the only person who had remained loyal. As gossip columnist Leonard Lyons wrote the following day, “It has been quite apparent, for more than a year, that the gifted writer needed psychiatric help.” Mailer was barely standing, but he went back down to the street. He walked north to Podhoretz’s apartment on 106th Street, and called for him to come out. Neither Podhoretz nor his wife heard anything. On the way back, he saw Donoghue and a friend. Mailer tried to fight the friend and then, according to his diary, Donoghue. Although Donoghue was as drunk as Mailer, he knew better and left. Later, Mailer told Donoghue, “I wish you’d hit me.” Around 4:30, he went upstairs. His face and bullfighter’s shirt were bloody, and he had a black eye.
Only a few people were left. When Adele saw her husband, she taunted him, as she recalled in her memoir: “Aja toro, aja, come on you little faggot, where’s your cojones, did your ugly whore of a mistress cut them off, you son of a bitch.” Mailer’s diary reads as follows:
Head upstairs and have trouble getting in. Adele mocks me (fag crack)—I rush the door, others try to push me out, I flail, fight, succeed in getting in, Adele looks away in scorn, I hit her, then order others out. Mannix offers resistance, and I rumble with him, am too weak, and Lester bops him. Then go back in. There is Neddie, Clint, Les, & Adele—Back to the hall with Adele??? We come out, after while she leaves with others. I start to go to sleep, Les comes back, they are over at Humes—glass tale. Humes comes by—I abuse him, drive him away, as he flees, he drops bottle behind him on floor thus stopping my exit.
Several months before he died, Mailer looked back on the worst night of his life.
Well, Adele and I had been getting into bigger and bigger games when I ran for mayor in ’60 that got her, it absolutely got her, in a state of suppressed hysteria because she thought it was going to shatter our lives. What does she know about being a mayor, a mayor’s wife, what if I got elected? Like, you know, we had our children by then, we had Danielle, we had Betsy. Those were very important events for me in the ’50s, Danielle and Betsy being born. And, so, we were getting along very badly, and we were getting into a kind of gotcha routine where each of us was doing something that was superior to the other. And so finally I had this big party at which I was going to announce my coming out for mayor, and Adele was going nuts at the party, from my point of view. And, finally, in a rage I took out my penknife and stuck it into her with the idea of, “Here, you think you’re tough, I’m tougher.” It was madness. I was pretty drunk at the time and probably on pot. The idea was not to do her any damage, just give her a nick or two, you see? Damn it, if I didn’t nick her heart. She could have died from it. And, of course, they took her to the emergency hospital, cut her open from the sternum virtually down to below the navel. So for years afterwards, she had this huge scar and she’d sometimes show it at parties. This would give people the idea that I’d used a butcher knife, which is why Gore Vidal mentions a butcher knife.
Vidal’s reference to a butcher knife has not been located, but if he made it, he was not alone in getting things wrong. Evelyn Waugh—no friend of Mailer’s—wrote that he had cut his wife’s throat, and George Plimpton—always a friend—said that Mailer had used a kitchen knife. Another alleged that scissors had been used, and one claimed Mailer had shot her. In point of fact, the instrument was a slender black penknife or pocketknife with a two-and-a-half-inch blade that he used to clean his nails. He stabbed her twice, once in the back, which proved to be a superficial wound, and once in the upper abdomen. This thrust penetrated the pericardium, the tough, fibrous, conical sac that envelops the heart and the roots of the great blood vessels. By great luck, he missed his wife’s heart by a fraction of an inch.
Adele remembers someone named Mannix helping her to Humes’s apartment, and then disappearing. Humes says she was pale and in shock. He dragged a mattress from a bed and with his wife’s help got Adele to lie down and remain still. Anna Lou Humes held her hand and tried to comfort her as Adele kept repeating that this sort of thing didn’t happen to people like her, they only happened to Puerto Ricans. Humes, “always a take-charge guy,” according to Anna Lou, got on the telephone and called a doctor he knew, Conrad Rosenberg, who said he would come immediately. Humes also tried to find a psychiatrist because he believed that Mailer would fare better if hospitalized for a mental breakdown than being arrested for assault. Humes also called Barbara and Larry Alson and told them what had happened, and they immediately left for 94th Street, where Betsy was alone in the apartment with her father. Fan was notified and she took a cab, leaving Barney home with Danielle, who was visiting for the weekend. Shortly after they all arrived, an ambulance took Adele to University Hospital on 20th Street and Eighth Avenue, where she was admitted at eight A.M. Nettie rode with her.
Doc Humes said that when he saw Mailer in the apartment after the stabbing, he was in a “zombielike” state. “I don’t think he was fully aware of having stabbed her,” he said. But while Mailer’s diary says nothing about a knife or a wound, he later recognized what he had done. Humes had convinced Adele to tell the police and doctors that she had fallen on broken glass, and that was the cause of the wounds to her back and abdomen. That was her first explanation, but later she told the truth: “He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. He didn’t say a word. He stabbed me.”
Barbara knew a psychiatrist, Dr. Emmanuel Ghent, and had called him before she left for Humes’s apartment on 94th Street. She asked him to go to her brother’s apartment and examine him. Mailer was awakened by Ghent ringing his bell, but refused to let him in. When Fan and the Alsons arrived, Ghent told them what had happened and offered to see Mailer later. At some point, he told Barbara that Fan reminded him of “a Mafia mother.” Before she left for the hospital, Barbara called her brother and told him the situation. He roused himself and was gone by the time Fan arrived to pick up Betsy, who was then fourteen months old.
Mailer and the Alsons arrived at the hospital at about the same time. They found
the surgeon attending Adele, Dr. Macklin, and according to Larry Alson, Mailer began talking with him, carefully describing the nature of the incision. The doctor listened patiently and then left, telling them that the operation would take an hour. Mailer was able to get a glimpse of Adele and her sister Joan through a window. He and the Alsons were sent to a lower floor to wait. Mailer’s diary: “Descent into Hell on elevator.” They were all exhausted and distraught. “Oh, God,” Barbara recalled, “that was a terrible time.” She told her brother that he had to recognize that he had “flipped,” which angered him. For four hours, they waited in silence. Dr. Macklin finally came down in the early afternoon to say that she would make it. Dr. Rosenberg was also there and had a brief opportunity to observe Mailer, as he later testified.
The family and friends began closing ranks. After they left the hospital, there was a conference back at the 94th Street apartment. Attending were Fan and Barney, Cy Rembar and his wife, Billie, Doc Humes, Knox, Lester Blackiston, Podhoretz, a lawyer friend, John Cox, the Donoghues and a friend of theirs, Dick Devine, who advised Mailer to put on a suit. He did and left with Knox and Blackiston. They had drinks at Joey’s Bar and then went to the hospital, where he was allowed to see Adele.
Mailer’s diary record of the visit is brief: “Descent downtown to hosp. Knife. Adele’s fear.” In her memoir, she goes into more detail. “He looked haggard and strained, with dark circles under his eyes,” she wrote. She was fearful and tried to make him go away. He said, “Do you know that I watched you being wheeled into the operating room, and I’d never seen you look so beautiful. Do you understand why I did it? I love you and I had to save you from cancer.” She thought he was “hopelessly crazy,” but felt sorry for him. “He cried, and yes, I held him, and we wept together, but even in my grief, I knew his were tears of self-pity. It was all gone between us.” Mailer stayed the night at the Donoghues’ apartment. He recalled that he had “crazy ideas about going down to Cuba or something, joining Castro,” perhaps by renting a fishing boat in Provincetown. But the next morning, he called the hospital and left word he would be there.
Before he left, Fan arrived, and pressed her son to see Dr. Ghent. Mailer wrote about it later in a poem, “A Wandering in Prose: For Hemingway, November, 1960”: “That first unmanageable cell to / stifle his existence arrived / on a morning when by / an extreme act of the will / he chose not to strike his / mother.” The poem dates the moment as coming two days after he had stabbed his wife. By his reasoning, if it can be called that, he had saved Adele from cancer by stabbing her. And, by not throttling the woman who loved him more than anyone else ever would, he had allowed a cell in his own body to take the leap into cancer. He left with Knox. Mailer asked him to go into the 94th Street apartment and retrieve the open letter to Castro that he had been working on for the past three weeks. “Christ, I thought, he stabbed his wife the night before and what was uppermost in his mind? Getting the letter published. It did not surprise me. The foundation of Norman’s being is the sum of his writing, and that letter to Castro was a building block in that foundation.” Knox said he would get the letter if Mailer gave him the penknife. “Reluctantly,” Mailer agreed, but after Knox gave him the letter Mailer changed his mind and wanted the knife back “for personal reasons.” Knox relinquished it.
From there, Mailer left Knox to see Dr. Ghent and had a conversation with him. He then kept a two P.M. appointment with Mike Wallace to tape an interview for WNTA-TV. He told Wallace that he intended to run for mayor on the Existentialist ticket. He also said that disarming young gang members was probably impossible. “The knife to a juvenile delinquent is very meaningful,” he said. “You see, it’s his sword—his manhood.” Mailer met Podhoretz for dinner and asked him to do everything possible to keep him from being sent to a mental institution. Then they went to the hospital, where he planned to be arrested. A nurse told them to wait for five minutes, and then three detectives arrested him and took the knife. Detective Francis J. Burns told him that his wife had admitted he had stabbed her. Mailer denied it. Adele also said that she did not wish to see him. Mailer was handcuffed and taken to the West 100th Street police station. Podhoretz was allowed to go with him, and said the police were polite. Mailer told the police, “I refuse to answer your questions.” The lawyer John Cox arrived and, in his presence, Mailer was photographed and booked.
Early the next morning, he was taken to felony court on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. Reporters were waiting. All Mailer said was that he loved his wife. He was again photographed, and then put in a lineup with other detainees. At the hearing a report from Dr. Rosenberg was read by Assistant District Attorney William Reilly: “In my opinion Norman Mailer is having an acute paranoid breakdown with delusional thinking and is both homicidal and suicidal. His admission to a hospital is urgently advised.” According to wire service reports, Mailer challenged the report as “gratuitous and presumptuous.” The Times carried the rest of his statement: “Naturally I have been a little upset but I have never been out of my mental faculties. I only saw Dr. Rosenberg for thirty seconds or a minute. It is important to me not to be sent to a mental hospital because my work in the future will be considered that of a disordered mind. My pride is that I can explore areas of experience that other men are afraid of. I insist that I am sane.” Magistrate Rueben Levy told Mailer, “Your recent history indicates that you cannot distinguish fiction from reality,” and committed him to Bellevue Hospital for observation.
Levy’s judgment was wise. Mailer was incensed and intoxicated when he stabbed the mother of two of his children, but the next day, sober, he told Mike Wallace and a television audience of his intention to run for mayor of the nation’s largest city on the ticket of a political party that did not exist. But if he was unhinged, he was mad north-north-west. His diary detailing the events of the three-week period during which he was detained in Bellevue shows a mind alert to the uniqueness of his experience and eager to garner biographical shards from the men in the violent ward where he was confined. The early part of the diary is retrospective, while the rest was written day by day in the hospital. In the manner of the Puritan fathers, Emerson, and Whitman, Mailer knew the extraordinary benefit of having a written record of a bad time. Emerson turned his diary entries into lectures and essays; Mailer saw his as ore for his fiction. He not only recorded events and his responses to them, he also noted, as he had in the army, marbles of fact that could be used in his fiction. He notes, for example, the “head-sweat on cop” who arrested him; a “Negro being beaten up” at the 100th Street precinct; and the story of Fred W., a murderer who confessed to detectives, in exchange for a pack of cigarettes and a pint of sherry, how he cut the throat of a lover with a broken beer bottle. He wanted to get out of Bellevue, but while there his novelist’s instincts never waned. Three years later he would draw on these experiences for An American Dream.
The inmates in the violent ward passed their time betting cigarettes in a card game called Bordertown, a variant of pinochle, which Mailer called “my tranquillizer.” Forty-five years later, he remembered the rules taught to him by Fred W. He had visitors—his mother and father, Barbara, Cy Rembar, Joseph Brill, a criminal lawyer, and Knox, who Mailer told that he feared getting electric shock treatments. Rev. Steve Chinlund, who Mailer knew slightly, visited and told him about his visits to Adele in the hospital. Mailer was jealous and told his sister to tell Adele not to fall in love with Chinlund. The three men he spent the most time with in Bellevue were Fred W., Harry G., and Arnold Kemp. Fred W., a jailhouse character and con artist, was given a long sentence for his crimes. Kemp, a young man from Harlem who spent almost a decade in prison for armed robbery, later got a graduate degree from Harvard, and wrote a novel that Mailer blurbed. They corresponded for years. Harry G. was in Bellevue for stabbing his brother, and Mailer was eager to hear his story. He had “rabbinical” discussions with Harry, who was highly intelligent but seriously disturbed. Harry “let slip that he is not altogether unconvinced
he is the Second Coming.” After he was released, he wrote a poem about Harry’s assault on his brother: “So long / as / you / use / a knife / there’s / some / love left.” It is invariably and incorrectly regarded as referring to his assault on Adele.
Dr. Jordan Lachmann was his psychiatrist, and they met daily. Mailer recited his biography to him as he probed his resistance to treatment. He told him the story of Castro in the jungle and “made the argument of existential psychosis.” For a time, it was touch-and-go as to whether he would be released, and when Lachmann told him he could be sent to a sanitarium for an extended period, Mailer called it “a Kafkan nightmare.” Much later, he remembered telling “the doctors who were quizzing me: ‘Didn’t you guys ever hear of a crime of passion?’ From their point of view, there I was a Jewish intellectual. Jewish intellectuals don’t have crimes of passion, they just go crazy.” Finally, Mailer said, Lachmann “had the guts to let me out.” His diary ends with this entry for December 8.
At 4:30, the guard who had a writer for wife, took me aside and whispered, “Today,” after querying me on when I would get out. A few minutes later I was called, “Mailer, get your belongings.” So I said my goodbyes and moved to the door, feeling quite moved at leaving them, and then getting dressed, Captain Kennedy, the trip in the Black Maria with Burns, the Tombs and the Bellevue workers, out to the interview with reporters and trip home with Brill. Kids at the door and then greeting Adele.
Having been declared “not psychotic” by Dr. Lachmann, Mailer appeared on January 12, 1961, in court to learn if there was sufficient evidence for felonious assault charges to be sent to a grand jury. Adele accompanied him and testified. “My husband and I are perfectly happy together,” she said, and declined to sign a complaint against him. When asked whether she had seen the penknife, she said she didn’t remember because she had been drinking. A few weeks later, a reporter went to the Mailers’ apartment to inform him he had been indicted. As Adele cooked dinner and Danielle and Betsy read a picture book, Mailer said that he couldn’t say anything about the case. Asked if the charges, which could have led to a five- to ten-year prison term, had affected his writing, he said, “I really couldn’t say if this is affecting the writing. I don’t think about it—except on certain days.” He had spent eight hours that day in his Brooklyn studio.
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