Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  His polemics, coming at a time when the nation was increasingly roiled about the Vietnam War and uneasy about some of the advances of technology, brought raves from reviewers when Cannibals and Christians was published in August. The New York Times reviewer, Eliot Fremont-Smith, proposed Mailer for the Nobel Prize in his review. A British reviewer, A. Alvarez, noted that on one page Mailer writes “with the speed and rawness of insight of Dostoievsky,” and on the next, when giving an “existential analysis of the bowel-movements,” sounds like General Jack D. Ripper, “the bodyfluids man in Dr. Strangelove.” He went on to say that “Dr. Mailer” was a diagnostician with “an almost extra-sensory perception for the faintest signs and vibrations which show where the sickness lies” in America. The British poet and novelist John Wain, whose work had appeared with Mailer’s in an anthology devoted to the Beats and their English counterparts, the “Angry Young Men,” said in his review that Mailer was attempting “to position himself so as to stand face to face with the true identity of our time, our time in America.” Written in what Wain called “a time of panic and mortal illness,” Cannibals and Christians can now be seen as a rehearsal for what many believe to be his greatest work, The Armies of the Night, preparing the ground for it much as Julius Caesar did for Hamlet.

  Act IV, the Provincetown theater Beverly was involved in with director Leo Garen, was a small operation, but it put on some ambitious productions, including plays by Pirandello and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Mailer cast Beverly as Lulu in Act IV’s production of The Deer Park, which opened on August 16, 1966. She and Mailer had begun to quarrel, however, and while they would continue to collaborate on dramatic and film projects for two more years, the marriage was beginning to come apart. José Torres recalled one dinner party that summer when they got into a fierce argument. When she made a comment about Mailer’s mother, Torres said, Mailer was “white with fury.” He said, “Beverly, I am going to get up and throw you out the window,” but Torres interceded and he and Mailer went for a walk to defuse the situation. His extramarital flings were one of the chief causes of their difficulties. Over a decade later Beverly said that Mailer was seeing other women not long after they were together. “When I was pregnant, he had an airline stewardess. Three days after bringing home our baby, he began an affair.” Beverly may have been referring to Carol Stevens, whom Mailer had met when he was still with Jeanne Campbell.

  An accomplished jazz singer from Philadelphia who worked with major artists such as the Modern Jazz Quartet, Coleman Hawkins, and Bill Evans, Stevens was on a date with Clay Felker at Small’s Paradise, a jazz nightclub in Harlem, sometime in late 1962, when Mailer walked in. Felker invited him to join them. Mailer danced with Carol and they drank and talked. When it was time to leave, Mailer said, “Let’s go” to her. To his surprise, she replied that she was going home with the gentleman who brought her. As they stood on the sidewalk talking, Mailer picked her up and whirled her around over his head, as he once did with his sister. “Sheer exuberance,” Stevens recalled. A year later, more or less, he called her on the phone. “Did you finally get down to ‘S’ in your address book?” she asked. They went out and ended up in bed. Not long after this, she went to the party celebrating his engagement to Beverly and met several members of his family. Barney impressed her, she said. She continued to see Mailer after he married Beverly.

  Beverly’s acting career was a major cause of friction: she was unhappy about being cast as Lulu in the play, first in Provincetown, and again five months later when the play opened in New York. She wanted to play Elena and believed Mailer had given the part to someone else to hold her down. Mickey Knox disagreed: “Norman never held her down,” he said. “In fact, one of the reasons he did Deer Park was to put his wives into it” (Adele was the understudy for the role of Elena). Beverly said that he put her down because “he doesn’t want to share the limelight. He enjoys humiliating me.” Her interpretation is both strengthened and weakened by Mailer’s report on the play at the end of the summer to Uncle Louis and Aunt Moos: “We did it up here in Provincetown in a theater Beverly helped to start up (she is, by the way, a superb actress—woe is me—I’m not used to other talent in the family).” Beverly told Mailer biographer Mary Dearborn that she had devoted herself “to running the (at times enormous) Mailer household. Norman’s children from his previous marriages came and went, and there were always staffers and Norman’s friends underfoot, waiting to be fed.” Mailer said later that the marriage to Beverly had “begun to wallow, then had sunk: his fourth wife, an actress, had seen her career drown in the rigors of managing so large a home.” Although Beverly told an interviewer in the spring of 1967 that “Norman’s career is the most important to me,” she said later that his criticisms of her acting troubled her so much that “I began to feel I had no career.” After they separated, Beverly went on to a long, successful acting career, mainly on the stage, well into her eighties.

  Mailer had cut the play from five hours to two and a half; he told Knox he had gotten rid of “all the lard.” He now planned to mount the play the coming winter off-Broadway at the Theatre De Lys in the Village. As he said in another letter, “At least I’ll be done finally with the play. Clear and shut after eight years. God.” In addition to revising the play and writing Why Are We in Vietnam? that summer, he had written a book review of Rush to Judgment, Mark Lane’s long critique of the Warren Commission Report. Lane argued that the commission “had no intention of trying to find any other assassin than Oswald.” Mailer didn’t quibble with the commission’s massive assemblage of fact, nor did he accuse it of suppressing information. Rather, he faulted it for presenting the evidence so that it “fitted a bed of Procrustes.” His suspicion was that the Soviets had made Oswald their minion as the price of allowing him to return home after two years in Minsk. He proposed that a “literary commission supported by public subscription” and headed by someone of the stature of Edmund Wilson or Dwight Macdonald be formed to resift the material in the twenty-six volumes, as well as follow untouched leads. As he said at the end of his review, “The game is not over. Nor the echo of muffled drums. Nor the memory of the riderless horse.” His proposal found no backers. But Mailer persisted, and became, with some help from Jean Malaquais, his own commission of investigation. It would take him thirty years to reach the end of his obsession.

  The Mailers were back in New York just in time to attend the social event of the year, perhaps the decade, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. Capote sponsored the event to introduce the Washington Post’s new publisher, Katharine Graham, to New York.

  Capote chose the Plaza Hotel for the event because he thought it had the most elegant ballroom in the city. He invited 540 people (about four hundred came), including a score of titled European nobility, neighbors from Long Island, and his New York doorman. Writers who attended the November 28 event included Hellman, Plimpton, Harper Lee, Baldwin, Arthur Miller, Buckley, Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and John Steinbeck. Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda, Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow were there, and many other Hollywood stars. The daughters of three presidents—Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Margaret Truman Daniel, and Lynda Bird Johnson—came, as did several Kennedys, including the late president’s mother, his two brothers, Ted and Robert, and two of his sisters, Jean Kennedy Smith and Pat Kennedy Lawford, with whom Mailer began a long friendship that night. President Johnson was not invited, nor was Gore Vidal.

  According to his biographer, after the tremendous success earlier that year of In Cold Blood, his nonfiction novel about the murder of a family in Kansas, Capote was cockier than Napoleon after Austerlitz. He drew great pleasure from deciding who would come and who not, and said he made five hundred friends and fifteen thousand enemies. Formally, the event was a bal masqué, which required men to come in black tie with black masks, while women wore either black or white gowns and masks. Masks were supposed to remain in place until midnight, but this rule was honored as much in the breach as the observanc
e. The guest of honor and Capote greeted guests at the door after they were announced.

  Over his tux, Mailer recalled, he was wearing a “dirty gabardine raincoat.” Beverly wore a white fur wrap over a black dress. He enjoyed himself tremendously, and called it one of the best parties of all time. Looking back on it, he said, “Everything felt anointed that night. Truman had certainly brought it off. It certainly was his greatest coup. For some, and I might be one of them, that party was even greater than any particular one of his books.” McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson’s national security advisor, was present, and Mailer could not resist inserting the Vietnam War into a conversation Bundy was having with Hellman. Harsh words were exchanged and Mailer invited him to step outside. “I was dissolute and full of drink. But I’d have killed him that night, I was so angry,” he said. “I had a terrible argument with Lillian Hellman as a result. Because she overheard it, she stopped it. She was always such a celebrity fucker. It must be said of Lillian that when the chips were down she’d always go for the guy who had the most clout.” The argument drove a wedge between them and they didn’t speak for over a year. Women’s Wear Daily gave Mailer the Worst-Dressed Award because of his rumpled raincoat. When asked about the award many years later, he laughed and said, “How little they knew about how to murder me.”

  The ball was held on the same day that preparations for the play (published by Dial Press in mid-1967) began. Dial had paid him $20,000, a high price for a play that had not yet had a full-scale production. After casting and “ten stunning maniacally depressive days of rehearsal” under director Leo Garen, the play opened on January 31, 1967. In his introduction to the published version, Mailer said that the play was “perhaps the dearest work of all my work,” even more so than the novel from which it grew. It was, he hoped, funnier, sadder, more tragic, and possessed of more layers. “If the compass was obligatorily more narrow, the well was being dug to a deeper water.” He now had a play with thirteen characters and eighty-eight brief scenes (a huge electronic tote board displayed the scene number, counting down to zero) in two acts. Continuity was spotty in a play that went, Mailer said, “from explosion to explosion,” as rapid as the cuts in a film. The play was a bastard, he wrote, the offspring of a “realistic play and that electric sense of transition which lives in the interruptions and symbols of The Theatre of the Absurd.” The cast was solid, not dazzling. Mailer, who did the casting, had some pros: Hugh Marlow as Eitel, Will Lee as the Hollywood magnate Herman Teppis, and, as Marion Faye, Rip Torn, an impressive young actor who would win an Obie for his role. Beverly continued as Lulu, and Buzz Farbar as the orgiast Don Beda. A relative unknown, Rosemary Tory, played Elena, the female lead, and Knox was Collie Munshin, Teppis’s comically unprincipled son-in-law. Mailer thought the play as staged could not be immediately understood, and was worried, therefore, about the critics.

  The first reviews were generous, if not superlative, with praise, especially of Lee as the marvelously fraudulent Teppis, “a twin tower of sentimentality and ruthlessness” who is such a shameless vice figure, Walter Kerr wrote in the Times, that the audience is happy to see him return. Later notices were not as good, even though Mailer gave lengthy interviews to The Village Voice and the New York Post. He also published “A Statement of Aims by the Playwright” in the Voice and, ten days before the premiere, a long essay on the front page of the arts section of the Sunday New York Times explaining the difficulties of hammering it into shape through four rewrites over ten years. He said the play’s fate will be decided in “the electric hour when the drama reviewer sprints from the theater, snatches his opening lead from the well-tuned bag of his wit, and is off to his desk, say, his guillotine.” He ends his piece, titled “Mr. Mailer Hands Out the Cigars,” by saying that the cigar’s band reads: “Be advised the actors speak so clearly you need not miss a line.” Walt Whitman wrote anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass; Mailer didn’t go this far, but he did provide all the leads, prompts, nudges, and background information—a fully packed press kit—needed to make the work of reviewers easier, as well as implying that those of taste and sagacity would appreciate his play. “I wanted the critics to feel self-conscious at the opening,” he said. “You have to hustle.”

  On opening night, he threw a huge party. Over five hundred people crowded into the Mailers’ Brooklyn apartment, where a rock ’n’ roll band played from a perch under the skylight. He did brief interviews with several invited newspaper columnists. One of them, Dick Schaap of the New York Post, quoted Mailer as saying that while it was too early to tell, “I think we’ve got a hit.” At the end of February, he purchased a full-page ad in the Times, and to celebrate the show’s one hundredth performance at the end of April, he persuaded Dial Press to host a Village block party, with free food, drink, music, and a pep talk from Mailer. By this time, however, the three-hundred-seat Theatre De Lys was only half full for most performances.

  He did everything possible to promote the play, beating “his own drum to shreds” as one reviewer put it, but finally it was only a middling success. Why? First, the play has thirteen characters each of whom has a rich history, so “the complicated story needs vast quantities of exposition.” Second, the play is set during the Korean War and the characters, now residing in some antechamber of hell, are remembering everything. The action is over; the inmates are serving their sentences. Third, while the evil characters are vividly imagined, those with virtue are stale. As Walter Kerr put it, “Mailer is a moralist and concerned with unmasking evil wherever he finds it, which is everywhere.” So there is a great deal of laughter because “unmitigated evil invariably creates in the viewer a happy impulse to hilarity.” But Eitel, the director who bewails his lost integrity, is “pompous and more than a bit foolish,” Kerr says. Finally, several of the characters are philosophers and “spout philosophy and assorted Mailerisms.” Faithful to his vision even as the audiences dwindled, he continued to pump in money. “I hold on because . . . I don’t know why—I just don’t want to close it,” he wrote to Knox. On May 21, after 127 performances, the play closed. He had lost $60,000.

  Offsetting this money drain was income from four books he published in 1967. The first was a collection of all nineteen of his previously published short stories for a Dell paperback. The play’s script, with a long introduction on the state of American theater (he spent two weeks seeing about a dozen plays in New York), came out in August, followed a month later by Why Are We in Vietnam? Finally, in November, CBS/Macmillan published The Bullfight, an ill-conceived project worked up in collaboration with his young friend, Buzz Farbar. It consists of Mailer’s 8,500-word profile of an iconoclastic Mexican torero known as “El Loco,” a fine essay (and his first original piece in Playboy) that captures the magic of the Sunday bullfight, with ninety-one photographs of a bullfight. Accompanying the book is an LP record of Mailer reading part of the essay, and Hugh Marlow and Rosemary Tory reading Federico García Lorca’s famous bullfighting poem “Lament for Sánchez Mejías,” which Mailer and his bilingual daughter, Susan, translated. The photos are small, often confusing, and do not follow one particular fight, but several (not El Loco’s), making for a jerky presentation. The book and record came packed in a bulky, ugly plastic container that he must have hated; the book was so poorly made that the front cover tended to split at the hinge. The few reviews were bad and the book, perhaps his worst, disappeared quickly.

  THAT SPRING, THE National Institute of Arts and Letters invited Mailer to become a member, but he had reservations. Letters went back and forth with Mailer expressing “reluctance” to accept. He said he was troubled that Henry Miller, Algren, Jones, Burroughs, and Ginsberg were not members. Feeling, however, that it would be “ungracious” to his nominators to decline, he accepted membership. He later learned that Miller had been a member since 1957; Algren, Burroughs, and Ginsberg were later elected. Mailer couldn’t attend the welcoming dinner; he was giving antiwar speeches at several universities.

  His exchange wi
th the institute occurred when the play was still selling out every night. Having seen it fifty times and watched the director make the necessary adjustments, he was getting bored talking to the actors about the nuts and bolts of stagecraft. Instead, he huddled with Farbar and Knox at a table in Casey’s, a Village bar. They began creating characters: Mailer, “The Prince,” was the leader of a Mafia gang; Knox was “Twenty Years,” reflecting his two decades as an actor; Farbar was “Buzz Cameo” a reference to his brief role in the play. “We had absolutely fantastic stuff going as we were drinking,” Mailer recalled. As Knox remembers it, “Norman suggested to Buzz and me that since we were so brilliantly witty during our nightly razzle-dazzle repartée, we should make a movie. He conceived of the premise: Three hoods go to the mattresses (hood-talk for hiding out). That was it, leaving the field of action open for us to improvise, be funny, wild, crazy, or inventive.” Farbar knew an accomplished young filmmaker, Donn Pennebaker, who had made Don’t Look Back, a documentary about Bob Dylan, and he agreed to film the action for $10 an hour; he also supplied a room in a Brooklyn office building for the shoot. Mailer put up an initial $1,600 and, in mid-March over four consecutive evenings from midnight until dawn, they made a film called Wild 90. There was no script.