“I wanted a home and children desperately,” Beverly said, recalling their meeting. “I was attracted to the vulnerability underneath the tough act. He walked me to my apartment. That night he was wonderful in bed.” Mailer later learned that a few years earlier, when she had been working as a hostess on television quiz shows, she had been in a long-term relationship with jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, a man Mailer admired. Davis would become the model for Shago Martin, a brilliant jazz vocalist who was one of the major figures in his next novel, An American Dream.
Mailer was still in touch with Jeanne, but their contacts had diminished. When Randolph Churchill flew to the U.S. to accept honorary citizenship for his father from Congress in April, he stopped in New York and visited with Jeanne, a dear friend. Mailer saved an Associated Press photo of them that appeared in the New York Post. Jeanne, wearing a wide brim hat, is smiling and holding Churchill’s toy pug, Oswald, in her lap. The dog’s name seems to have stuck with Mailer: he used it in Dream as Barney Kelly’s middle name. His first name came from I. B. Mailer.
By spring, Beverly had moved into 142 Columbia Heights. Mailer wrote to Knox in early June to say that he had been thinking about traveling around the country and “seeing what the mood is.” A Broadway play in which Beverly had a leading role, The Heroine, had folded and she was eager to join him. First, they would drive to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to see Fig and Ecey, and then on to Las Vegas for the Patterson-Liston rematch on July 22. After the fight, which he considered writing about for Esquire as a bookend to “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” they planned to drive to San Francisco for a couple of weeks, and then take the long drive back via Georgia, where he would meet Beverly’s family. His idea was to get out of New York, range about the country with his new woman, and see what plot prompts for new work came his way. He had a wisp of a situation in mind, and he told his new agent, Scott Meredith, to leak word that he was working on a novel about “a man who takes a 21-year old girl to Las Vegas.” He was thinking of Beverly, although she was thirty-three. He said later, “I wanted a blond American girl; it was really as simple as that. A shiksa. And she was perfect; she fitted perfectly because she was adventurous. She came from a relatively—if you want to get down to it—a quite unremarkable southern family. She had risen in the world through her own efforts.” Shortly before they left for Arkansas, Jeanne sent Mailer a telegram saying that her lawyer would telephone him to ask for an immediate Mexican divorce. “My darling let us now be pragmatic,” she said. Mailer agreed. On July 9, he and Beverly drove off in his Triumph convertible with Tibo in the backseat. Mailer had given away Zsa Zsa and the last of the pups.
During their four days in Fayetteville, two important things happened: Beverly was tested for pregnancy and Mailer observed an autopsy. Beverly asked a pathologist friend of Fig’s if he would give her a pregnancy test, and he agreed to do so. The same doctor invited Mailer to watch him perform an autopsy he was doing the next day. Mailer used the experience in An American Dream. In the novel, Rojack’s doctor friend opens up an old man whose face was “lustful and proud, much hate in it, but disciplined.” He had cancer, but died of peritoneal gangrene when his appendix burst. It is all that Rojack can do not to retch when the odor hits his nostrils.
I remember I breathed it in to the top of the lung, and drew no further. Pinched it off in the windpipe. After half an hour of such breathing, my lungs were to ache for the rest of the day, but it was impossible to accept the old man’s odor all the way in. . . . I kept getting a whiff of the smell for the next two days, all along the trip through the dried hard-up lands of Oklahoma, northern Texas, New Mexico, on into the deserts of Arizona and southern Nevada where Las Vegas sits in the mirror of the moon. Then for weeks I never lost the smell. In the beginning the dead man came back at every turn, he came back from phosphate fertilizer in every farmer’s field, he rose up out of every bump of a dead rabbit on the road, from each rotting ghost in the stump of a tree, he chose to come back later at every hint of a hole in emotion or a pit of decay. . . .
In some, madness must come in with breath, mill through the blood and be breathed out again. In some it goes up to the mind. Some take the madness and stop it with discipline. Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied. In that corpse I saw, madness went down to the blood—leucocytes gorged the liver, the spleen, the enlarged heart and violet-black lungs, dug into the intestines, germinated stench.
The hypothesis that cancer and schizophrenia were mutually exclusive cohered here, and Mailer’s intuition, gained on patrols in Luzon, that smell is the primal sense was further confirmed.
He explored his hunch in An American Dream and further elaborated it in later work, especially his 1984 mystery novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance. He also spelled it out in a one-page, handwritten note, probably written in late 1963. Titled “Cancer,” it begins by hypothesizing that cancer results from “impotent emotion,” which “cannot find the situation for its life.” An ugly woman who waits for a handsome lover is a slave to this emotion, as is a poor young man who wishes ill on his wealthy relatives but sees them continue to prosper. So too is “any over-civilized person who carries murder within” but represses it. Without relief, the emotion is “visited upon the cells” of the body, and “when such inner tension becomes acute, the cells live at the edge of rebellion—they may dare to secede from the body.” This Mailer calls a “psychosis of the cells” in his “Cancer” note; this is the madness Rojack saw in the organs of the old man. “When the weight of impossible desire becomes intolerable, either the mind or the body must divide itself from the whole.” Twenty years later, in 1981, neurobiologists conclusively established the hardwired link between the body’s immune system and the central nervous system. That mind affects body as much as the reverse was an article of faith for Mailer.
After leaving Arkansas, the couple drove to Las Vegas via the baked landscape of the high plains desert. Mailer thought about beginning the new novel with a description of the autopsy, but used it in the final chapter of An American Dream, which covers Rojack’s drive on the same route to Las Vegas. Encountering extraordinary bodily corruption by way of his nostrils opened new reaches in his imagination, an experience no doubt heightened by his struggle, all through 1963 and early 1964, to quit smoking two and a half packs of Camels a day. “I used the sense of smell,” he said shortly after finishing the novel, “because it’s the closest to the dream.” In addition, “it is the most shocking sense. All bourgeois society seems to be built on that one abstention. You never mention odors.” In Dream, he explored these off-limits olfactory lodes more thoroughly than any other American novelist before him or since.
They arrived in Las Vegas on July 20. Meeting them there was Harold Conrad, a fight promoter, and his wife, Mara Lynn, both of whom later appeared in Mailer’s films. A good deal of drinking took place and Mailer got into at least two fistfights. The championship fight two days later was a letdown. Mailer had privately concluded that it would be a fifteen-round draw, but Liston again defeated Patterson. His plan had been for the novel’s protagonist to drive to Las Vegas with a young woman to see the fight. But the boxing match was a repeat of the first one. Liston again knocked Patterson out in the first round and Mailer didn’t know how to proceed.
A telegram from Arkansas was delivered to their hotel: Beverly was pregnant. Because of his already weighty commitments, Mailer was distraught at first. He and Beverly fought, but during a late night drive into the desert were reconciled. The extravagant contrasts of this artificial city in the desert—drunks and millionaires, showgirls and grandmas, winners and losers, icy air-conditioning and baking sun—imprinted themselves on Mailer, always fascinated by opposites at close quarters. He would use Las Vegas as a touchstone for the contradictions of America more than once in books to come. Toward the end of July, with the new novel gestating, they left for San Francisco, where they ha
d made arrangements to meet his Harvard Advocate friend Mark Linenthal and his now ex-wife, Alice Adams.
San Francisco was an oasis after Las Vegas. They announced that they were getting married and there was some quiet celebration and outings with Linenthal, Adams, and Don Carpenter. They also spent time with the Beat crowd, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure. Mailer liked to ramble alone around the city. During several of these walks, he walked on narrow ledges, testing his nerve, probably in the Telegraph Hill area, as he later remembered. Mailer’s hand-eye coordination was poor, and he did not excel at sports such as baseball and basketball. At one point, he bought a pool table in an attempt to develop his skills, practiced hard, but had no aptitude for the game. But he prided himself on his balance, and later was able to walk the catenary of a thick hawser (aided by a balance pole) on the decks of his various homes in Provincetown and his Brooklyn apartment. When he awoke in the morning in San Francisco, he knew, as he later recalled, that he would feel a compulsion to walk on narrow ledges. He drew on these daily tests of balance for his description of Rojack’s harrowing minutes on the parapet of a penthouse balcony atop the Waldorf Towers.
After two weeks they got back on the road, driving to Arkansas, and then on to Columbus, Georgia, where they visited for two days with Beverly’s mother and stepfather, Brownie. In a letter to Fig, Mailer described him as “an ex-Southern master-sergeant, lick lips, blue lightning farter—one of the boys. He’s really like so many guys we used to know—the kind that you’d like if you went out on a drunk with him and would dislike if he picked your ass to chew.” (They also met Beverly’s half-brother, Charlie Brown, who two years later helped Mailer and Provincetown friend Eldred Mowery assemble a model, “Vertical City,” out of thousands of Lego blocks.) After a quick stop in Atlanta to meet Beverly’s stepmother, “a real crazy Southern-Georgia rich town lady,” they returned to New York in late August. With no trace of irony, he told Fig, “It was so nice not to have worries for six weeks.”
EXACTLY WHEN HE signed off on the arrangements for the publication of An American Dream is uncertain. His agent Scott Meredith was involved in lengthy discussions with Cy Rembar and various publishers while he and Beverly were away. By mid-September the deal was done. Mailer had left much of the bargaining to Meredith, but personally convinced Walter Minton to release him from his Putnam’s contract for one book. Mailer also sold the idea of writing the novel as a serial to Esquire editor Harold Hayes, who recalled that there was “great interest in the suicidal nature” of Mailer’s project. As much of an editorial gambler as Felker (who had moved to the New York Herald Tribune), Hayes offered a payment of $20,000. Shortly before or after this, in a forty-eight-hour wheeling-and-dealing session that Mailer said “was much like Hollywood,” Meredith sold the hard and soft cover rights to Dial and its paperback subsidiary Dell for what Mailer called “a fantastic advance royalty” of $125,000. “It seems,” he wrote to Adeline Naiman, “that I am finally hot again as a property. For the next year I’m in the soup because this novel’s got to be fairly good or I’ll be ambushed by more crossfire than anybody I can think of in recent years, and indeed will deserve the worst, so I’m off and writing.” He had worked against deadlines before, most notably on the weekly Village Voice columns and “The Big Bite” in Esquire. But now he had agreed to write a novel at the rate of ten to twelve thousand words a month for eight months, “one hundred thousand finished words,” as he wrote to Fig. The gamble was the boldest of his life to date.
He had already written the first and most of the second installment of the serial when The Presidential Papers came out in early November. It was not reviewed widely or enthusiastically and was all but forgotten in the blur that followed the assassination of the president two weeks later. His plan for writing the serial of the novel, which he pretty much adhered to, was to stay sixty days, or two installments, ahead of Esquire’s monthly publication date. The nation was still reeling from the president’s death and that of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, when the issue containing the first installment appeared.
The previous issue of Esquire (December), contained the last short story Mailer would write, “The Last Night,” a science fiction fantasy about the end of the world, and his fourteenth and final “Big Bite” column, in which he announced the serial. “The early installments,” he wrote, “will be in print long before I go to work on the later ones. Indeed it is likely I will be working on each installment up to the day Esquire goes to press. It’s been a long time since anything of this sort has been tried by an author who takes himself seriously.” He distinguished his effort from those of writers—Dreiser, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald—whose serialized novels had been completed before serialization. Dickens and Dostoyevsky were his models, he continued, “novelists of the first rank who put their books together under the exigency of meeting a magazine’s publication date each month.” He said that “no comparison is intended to Dickens and Dostoevsky,” noting that The Idiot was written when the Russian was “suffering from epileptic fits, two days past the date he had promised to deliver the manuscript,” writing only at night “when his mind could function between each epileptic fit.” But the strain Mailer was under, arguably, was somewhat commensurate. When he was only a third of the way done, he wrote to Carpenter that the serial “has me more or less pissing blood.” He also called An American Dream “one of the more Dostoevskian novels of the last hundred years.”
As the following passage from the opening installment in Esquire suggests, he intended to use Kennedy, in ways undetermined, in later chapters.
I met Jack Kennedy, for instance, in 1946. We were both war heroes and were both Freshmen in Congress. Congressman John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Democrat from Massachusetts, and Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York. We even spent one night together on a long double date and it promised to be a good night for me. I stole his girl.
The assassination not only smothered the reception of The Presidential Papers, it also destroyed whatever plans he had for using Kennedy in the novel. Mailer had intended to set the novel in 1965, but was forced to move Rojack’s narration back to an earlier time so that lack of comment on the assassination would not seem intentionally disrespectful. For the novel to be credible, Kennedy had to be president and he had to be alive. Furthermore, because the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was mentioned, and the novel was firmly set late in March, Rojack’s retelling of events could take place only in March 1963, approximately nine months before the dark day in Dallas.
But these complications came later. Immediately after the assassination, he seemed ready to abandon the project. He wrote to Mickey Knox on December 17.
The Kennedy thing hit very hard here. Women were crying in the streets (mainly good-looking women), a lot of middle-aged Negroes looked sad and very worried, and then we all sat around in gloom and watched the television set for the next seventy-two hours [Mailer watched it with Podhoretz]. Altogether it was one of the three events having something profoundly in common: Pearl Harbor Day and the death of Roosevelt being the other two. And the Ruby-Oswald stuff was just too much on top of it. I haven’t felt like writing a word about the whole thing, I’ve been too fucking depressed every which way. The main loss I think was a cultural one. Whether he wanted to or not Kennedy was giving a great boost to the arts, not because Jackie Kennedy was inviting Richard Wilbur to the White House, but somehow the lid was off, and now I fear it’s going to be clamped on tight again. . . . With Kennedy alive it was a good book, but with him dead, it’s just a curiosity, and somehow irritating in tone. I don’t even mind the loss of it in a funny way.
He also elaborated on his feelings about Kennedy in a letter to Yamanishi.
At any rate, I have no desire to write more now because the event is not only deeply depressing but enormous in its ramifications. Kennedy had personal charm—one misses him certainly that way—he was also nothing exceptional as a politician, rather a conventional middle-of-th
e-road leader of the Democratic Party. What was lost was an intangible good. There was a particular magic or let us say liberty surrounding Kennedy which enabled one to be critical of him in a way that had been impossible in America since the War, and all sorts of subtle but exciting changes were occurring in America’s culture.
Mailer said that Kennedy’s presidency had affected him personally: “My function has shifted in these few years from some sort of mysterious half-notorious leader of the Beat Generation, a sort of psychic guerilla leader, in fact, to something quite other, a respected if somewhat feared leader of the literary Establishment.”
Before Kennedy’s rise, he had considered himself a literary outlaw who was pleased to be seen as a contrarian and outsider. But Kennedy’s charisma, political ruthlessness, and movie-star looks, not to mention his war hero status and beautiful, artistic wife, galvanized Mailer’s imagination and drew him to the power nexus. He wanted a ticket into the new establishment; he wanted to influence it, push it in various adventurous ways; he wanted more energy, more power. He aspired to be the U.S. equivalent of what André Malraux was in de Gaulle’s France: minister of culture. But he also wanted to maintain his ties to the demimonde—to Greenwich Village hipsters, Harlem jazz joints, and Provincetown artists. The Kennedy clique seemed to understand his ambitions; one of them told Jeanne Campbell that Mailer was “an intellectual adventurer,” a remark Mailer said was accurate, if spiteful. Only such an adventurer, Mailer wrote, would write an open poem to the president, as he had done earlier. His interaction with the Kennedys made him understand the advantages accruing to someone who is both in and out of the game, participant and observer. Within two years of the assassination, Mailer would become the preeminent insider-outsider of American culture. While there were other rival claimants over the next forty years—Gore Vidal, most notably—and periods of partial eclipse, it was a position he never entirely relinquished.
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