At first, he pled not guilty, which meant he would have to stand trial. A short time later he decided to change his plea to guilty “because he feared a trial would bring harmful publicity to his wife and two children.” When he appeared in court for sentencing, Judge Mitchell D. Schweitzer said, “I gamble on human beings and I intend to gamble on you.” Mailer said in response, “I feel I did a lousy, dirty, cowardly thing.” Six months later, having kept out of trouble, he was given a suspended sentence and three years’ probation.
With few exceptions, he lived quietly during the first few months of 1961. Friends and family rallied around him. A letter appeared in Time shortly after he was released in response to the magazine’s conclusion that Mailer’s critical reputation had declined since Naked and the Dead. Signed by eight writers—Baldwin, Jason Epstein, Hellman, Kazin, Robert Lowell, Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, and William Phillips—the letter said that Time’s recent estimate of Mailer needed “correction.” His “work is of continuing brilliance and significance.” Vidal did not sign the letter, but he did reach out, inviting him and Adele to Edgewater, his home on the Hudson River a hundred miles north of New York. Mailer, who was awaiting trial at the time, never forgot the gesture, calling it “a fine thing to do at that point because it was his way of saying, ‘I’m not afraid of you, you’re first a literary man and second someone who got into criminal trouble,” and that was bold and decent. If our relations had stayed that way, we’d be dear friends today.” Podhoretz and Decter were similarly generous, and invited him to a party a couple of weeks after he was released, as Mailer recalled:
I walked into the room and the reactions were subtle as hell. Five degrees less warmth than I was accustomed to. Not fifteen degrees less—five. I guess that once you bring a violent man to a party, people are generally polite to him. Looking back on it, the stabbing was not altogether the turning point. I mean it was terribly shocking and things could never be the same. If any of us does something like that, people just don’t look at them in quite the same way. I think ten years went by before people forgot about it. Once in a while they would get a reminder and they would say, “Oh my God, yes.” I think the real separation came after Adele and I split up and Jeanne [Campbell] and I started going around together, because then I started traveling in another world.
Mailer met Lady Jeanne Campbell, a New York–based reporter for the London Evening Standard, at a party in March 1961. Adele was not at the party. She was out of bed and her incision was healing well, but she was unable to do anything strenuous. She said that there was no letup in his social life, that he was welcomed back to “the bosom of his sympathetic literary friends.” Some of them blamed Adele as much if not more than Mailer for “The Trouble.” James Jones, for one, said that the stabbing was partly the result of Adele being “a lousy wife.” Mailer’s army buddy Fig Gwaltney wrote on the envelope of a letter Mailer had written to him from Bellevue: “Letter written in psycho ward after he finally did to Adele what should’ve been done years earlier.” Fan Mailer, who on the day her son was committed to Bellevue told reporters, “My boy’s a genius,” wrote in her memoir: “Whatever happened with the stabbing she goaded him into it.”
Others saw Adele as being noble for not pressing charges. Judy Feiffer, then married to cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, said Adele’s “behavior towards Norman was admirable and loyal.” If Adele had turned against him, if she had revealed the harshest details of their marriage, he probably would have gone to prison. “I saved his neck,” Adele wrote in her memoir. “I could have put him away for fifteen years if I had chosen to testify.” But she didn’t. She wanted to keep the marriage going. “He was the man in her life,” Feiffer said, “and she’s a passionate woman.” After Mailer’s release, their relationship began to recover, and then in late March collapsed entirely. According to Adele, the decisive moment came when he returned home the day after a party. She accused him, correctly, of spending the night with another woman and threw him out. The next day she called a divorce lawyer.
“The Trouble” reverberated throughout the family. Even a half century later, Mailer’s sister found the event difficult to discuss. “I remember being terribly disappointed in him,” she said, “very angry about it.” At the time, she thought, “We’d never be the same, sort of like the end of everything.” Susan said, “It affected me very much. I wasn’t so little; I was eleven when it happened so I understood what was going on. I was very close to Adele, very fond of her.” Prior to the stabbing, she felt as if she had two sets of parents—Adele and her father and Chavo and her mother—but when her father was committed, her mother would no longer let her visit New York. This angered Mailer. “I happen to think that she was right,” Susan said. “You know, if I had a kid and something like this happened I would have reacted in the same way.” Her mother never fully trusted her father after the stabbing, Susan said, adding that the stabbing was “the single most painful thing in my childhood.” Danielle, asked when she realized that her father was the famous writer, Norman Mailer, replied, “I was maybe four or five, and thought something like: ‘My hair is brown; I’m Norman Mailer’s daughter; my father stabbed my mother.’ Throughout my childhood, to survive this piece of history, and navigate, I remained stubbornly neutral. Whenever it came to light that he was my father, invariably the person would remark, ‘Oh, you’re Norman’s kid.’ Pause. ‘Was your mother the one who he . . . ’ I have no memory of the post-stabbing events, only my mother’s ribbon scar dissecting her stomach. But I was fiercely loyal to my father, never allowed anger or disappointment to enter into our relationship. Only in recent years have I had a chance to reflect on the event in my art: I frequently focus on the female torso.”
Two years before her father’s death, Betsy repeated to a family friend what her father had said to her about the assault: “I let God down.” He had tears in his eyes, she said. The dynamic of the Mailer family was permanently altered. Reflecting on her parents’ relationship, she said:
I think there was so much antipathy at times, and so much guilt at times, and so much remorse and great passion and a depth of connection. It was so much all that all the time. And I think there were times when they loathed each other and there were times when they remembered how passionately they were in love. They both felt poignant and sad about what they had that was gone. I think, at times, there was a desire on both their parts to recover what they had.
“The Trouble” became one of Mailer’s memory crystals, an experience to be harvested, via refraction, for his fiction, but never to be delineated autobiographically. When questioned about it, he was usually guarded. In a 1997 interview, he said that his children paid a big price for his crime, and that much of the animosity toward him “comes from the fact of people saying, ‘That son of a bitch—he got away with it. He doesn’t deserve anything after that.’ I say leave it to heaven.” He did, however, make two considered statements in his books. The first was in his 1963 miscellany, The Presidential Papers: “One got out of Bellevue, one did a little work again. The marriage broke up. The man wasn’t good enough. The woman wasn’t good enough. A set of psychic stabbings took place.” The second, a brief recollection titled “The Shadow of the Crime,” came in his 1998 collection, an omnibus volume titled The Time of Our Time.
Through the years a shadow of the crime would accompany many hours. I could never write about it. Not all woe is kin to prose. It was one matter to be guilty—by inner measure, irredeemably guilty—it was another to present some literary manifest of what was lost and what was wasted, what was given to remorse and what was finally resistant to remorse. Violence is the child of the iron in one’s heart, and decomposes by its own laws.
The remainder of the piece is for the most part given over to a statement of regret about the collateral damage the stabbing inflicted on his “Open Letter to Fidel Castro,” a piece of writing he felt might have had “its effect on history,” but appeared too late to be of any consequence. He ended by noting
the “incalculable” damage done to his daughters. “Murder and its sibling, assault,” he concluded, “are the most wanton of the crimes, for they mangle the possibilities and expectations open to others.”
Perhaps his most frank statement about his blighted role as an unfrocked prophet came in a 1965 interview: “I lost any central purchase I had on the right to say what is happening. I’m parti pris. Now when I argue the times are violent, they can say, well, look what he did. I destroyed forever the possibility of being the Jeremiah of our time.” Not entirely, however. A comeback was not far off. After his release from Bellevue, “a good deal of the sweetness came back,” Barbara said. “It’s as if he really let go of something.” The fact that “he was pretty appalled at himself” made a “big difference” to the family. Years after the stabbing, he said, “A decade’s anger made me do it. After that, I felt better.” It would take two years for him to fully resume his literary career, but then he had it all his own way, in large part, for the next dozen years.
Adele, after she had recovered, became an alcoholic for twenty years until joining Alcoholics Anonymous, and then quit drinking entirely. “The Trouble” clouded her life. She became permanently bitter, according to Danielle, and “damaged in a lot of ways. Profoundly. And obsessed—as if symbolically she was never able to cut the tie with him.” Betsy said, “You know, my mother never stopped loving him, never. And she’s still obsessed with him; she still loves him.” At the end of her memoir, Adele wrote, “I was trapped in my purgatory of hatred.” Asked why she had written it, she replied, “I want my book to make Mailer suffer.” Over the decades, her relationship with him became progressively more distant and troubled.
At the legal proceeding where he was given his suspended sentence, his lawyer told the judge that he would make a contribution to society. He also said that Mailer had “reduced his drinking to a minimum,” which was not the case. Mailer wrote little during the months before and after the stabbing, but he drank heavily. Before the event, he drank “explosively”; afterward he drank “steadily—most nights I went to bed with all the vats loaded.” His hangovers were “steeped in dread” and he feared becoming an alcoholic. To avoid drinking too early in the day, he sorted through the notes in his pockets, his record of whiskey moments when some bar conversation or insight crystallized.
Cold War
The Lady / was / quite a queen / in her / own right /
You’re a great man / you’re a / very / great / man / only please / why can’t / you be / considerate / of others / as well? /
Heh heh, / can’t do two things / at once / said Rasputin. /
The poems, which were published as Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters) in 1962, are by turns observant—“Drinker / with a / problem said: I’ll drink / to that / even if / it’s not / quite / true”; angry—“Rip / the prisons open / Put / the convicts / on / television”; nuanced (and reflecting Lady Jeanne’s influence)—“The English / have a sense / of ambush / about vulgarity / it is: / do you / descend / the steps / properly?”; blunt—“In the first week / of their life / male jews / are crucified.” There is irony—“I want to / be a / fine / woman / and a / great / mother / to my / children / and / oh yes / you / she said”; and revealing: “If / Harry Golden / is the gentile’s / Jew / can I be / the Golden Goy?” Some are impressionistic, revealing the influence of Ezra Pound, whom Mailer had long admired: “the remembered musk / of wood-smoke at dusk / in Cambridge / and New Haven.”
The poetry volume sank quietly with few reviews, most of them late. Time was predictably nasty. John Simon, in the first of his long run of negative reviews of Mailer’s work, classified him with “the various anti- and non poets, whose tribe, regrettably, increases.” Writing in Poetry, May Swenson said that Mailer “longs to be a true primitive, a child making figurines out of his excrement,” but had praise for two poems, both titled “A Wandering in Prose: for Hemingway.” Only Richard Lanham in The Village Voice, who praised Mailer’s satirical powers, and Selden Rodman in The New York Times Book Review, were positive. Rodman, a friend of Mailer’s, compared the poems to those of e. e. cummings, and praised his “fast footwork and low blows.” Dwight Macdonald, writing in Commentary, found the poems to be “slangy” and “ironic,” but called the book “a triumph of bad taste.” The only reason it was not a trivial collection, he said, is that Mailer “seems to be trying to find out how much weight his ideas (or better, his attitudes) will bear.” He advised Mailer to move on, get back to prose. In the only interview given when the book was published, Mailer said that writing poems was an interlude between long stretches of disciplined novel writing. But there was another reason, which he later revealed: poetry was a “way of digging myself out of the hole I had dug for myself.” Poetry was “the first rung.” He was mending.
AT THE PARTY where Mailer met Jeanne Campbell (Vidal’s apartment on East 55th Street), they went off to a separate room to talk, had a long staring match, and were besotted. “The night I met him,” she said, “I knew I was going to marry him and have his child.” She didn’t become pregnant that night but, as with Bea and Adele, the first night was spent in bed. He recalled their meeting eighteen months before he died: “I went to a party and met Jeanne Campbell and we spent a day and a half in the sack. That was the last straw, that and the fact that Adele wanted me to quit drinking because her psychoanalyst said I had to. I said I couldn’t quit drinking then or I’d get cancer, but offered to drink outside the house a couple of nights a week. She wouldn’t accept this, and so I moved out.” He moved into his sister’s apartment in the Village, but spent much of his time at Jeanne’s.
If Adele lacked self-confidence, Jeanne Louise Campbell was brimming with it. On one side, she was the daughter of Ian Campbell, the 11th Duke of Argyll and head of the Clan Campbell, one of the great families in Scotland. On the other, she was the daughter of Janet Gladys Aitken, whose father, William “Max” Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, was one of the most powerful press barons in England. A confidant of both Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt, he headed the British delegation that met with Joseph Stalin after the German invasion of Russia. Beaverbrook’s daughter and son-in-law were divorced in 1934, but Beaverbrook had taken over the job of raising Jeanne Louise several years earlier. She was named after Jeanne Marie, Lady Malcolm, the illegitimate daughter of American actress Lily Langtry and Prince Louis of Battenberg, and Princess Louise, the sixth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Through Jeanne’s family connections, and her own moxie, she became acquainted with many of the most influential and accomplished people in Great Britain. Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, was a particular friend.
In the late 1950s, she had a fairly lengthy affair with a man thirty years her senior, Henry Luce, the founder of the Time-Life empire, who met her at La Capponcina, Beaverbrook’s villa on the French Riviera. He offered her a job at Time; she accepted and came to New York in 1956. Luce thought of marrying the statuesque young woman with a wild mass of curly hair, but his wife, the politician and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce, convinced him otherwise. Campbell had left Time and was working for one of her grandfather’s papers, the London Evening Standard, when she met Mailer at Vidal’s party. Vidal found her to be “very attractive, very bright,” and Mailer thought he had “some idea of possibly having some sort of liaison with her.” When Vidal asked Campbell what had attracted her to Mailer, she said, “I had never gone to bed with a Jew before.” Mailer had never slept with the daughter of a duke before, and was similarly curious. Besides the personal attraction he felt, he thought that Lady Jeanne’s social ties and acumen could be a great literary resource. That she was leaving the man whose magazines had attacked and ridiculed him for the past decade made her irresistible. He learned that Luce “suffered a bit” when he heard of Jeanne’s affair. “I loved the idea,” he said.
Jeanne’s voice was the first thing that Mailer noticed. “She had this incredibly beautiful voice and was capable of putting on numerous air
s, a voice which was as lovely as Mozart. It had an absolute range. If she’d been able to move as well as she spoke, she would have been a great actress.” She was thirty-one when they met, he recalled,
but she looked a little older, maybe 35. And she was slightly . . . almost plump. And she had fiery eyes, these pale green eyes, full of spite and vigor and venom and wit. How to put it? They had their power. Combative, and I was just in the mood for that. She was wearing white pearls and I thought, “She’s a very wealthy woman from Westchester.” She was wearing a gray outfit with white pearls, and gloves, perhaps. I didn’t know it was Lady Jeanne—all I knew was here’s this dame who’s attractive to me because of some sort of special social—I don’t know—upper class about it. Having been with Adele for years, I was in the mood for a woman who was in the upper class.
She was poised, he said, and “very proud to be Lady Jeanne, but never said a word about it.” Their dissimilar backgrounds added to their initial attraction, as Mailer recalled: “There I am, from a middle class Jewish family, and I’m in sort of an indefinable position. Because I’m a well-known author, in a certain sense I’m part of the establishment. But I’m a criminal, a felon on parole. There she is, Lady Jeanne, her father is a duke.” His situation made him think of how Jones and Styron “would be eating their fucking hearts out” to be in his position. He was having great fun, he said, but more important, “I was learning about things. The novelist in me was absolutely on fire. I loved it.” The people who had shaped his thinking the most, he said, were Jean Malaquais (Lindner was second) and Jeanne Campbell, the former on intellectual matters and the latter on social ones. Jeanne’s influence on An American Dream was especially pronounced, although she got no pleasure from being the model for the protagonist’s wife, Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly. She called the novel “the hate book of all time.” Deborah is murdered in chapter one.
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