Film historian Michael Chaiken described the result as “a gestalt of galoot poetics, direct cinema, and lowbrow comedy with three drunkards launching a barrage of profanity-laced repartee and virulent put-downs.” None of the three principals could claim a drop of Italian blood, but they knew how to curse creatively. “Mailer,” Chaiken wrote, “sounding like Paul Muni trying to pass a kidney stone” is central to all that transpires in the ninety-minute film (thus the title). He harangues his pals for forty-five minutes, which soon becomes tedious. It revives somewhat in the second half when visitors come to the hideout. Beverly Bentley, playing the Prince’s wife, drops in, as do José Torres and his wife, Ramona, and other members of the cast of The Deer Park. Torres brings his German shepherd and the film reaches its climax when Mailer gets down on all fours and barks face-to-face with the dog.
Film critic Jonas Mekas convinced Mailer to watch several experimental films at the Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque. He and Beverly saw Kenneth Anger’s 1964 film about bikers, Scorpio Rising, and Andy Warhol’s 1965 film, Kitchen. Mailer admired Warhol’s courage in dramatically slowing the action, but otherwise found it to be “horrible.” He said that Warhol’s film “had the horror of the twentieth century in it. The refrigerator was making too much noise. The beautiful heroine, Edie Sedgwick, has the sniffles. She keeps blowing her nose while the hero keeps trying to rustle a sandwich together out of wax paper.” The film is “almost unendurable,” he said. Wild 90 may be worse. Mailer, operating in what he once referred to as his “usual narcissistic fog,” paid no attention to warnings about recording the sound properly, resulting in a film which “sounds,” he said, “as if everybody is talking through a jock strap.”
He began editing the film almost immediately. “I just loved cutting,” he said. “I loved the sort of—if you will—the metaphysical problems involved.” The film premiered on January 7, 1968, at the New Cinema Playhouse in Manhattan. The reviews were abysmal. Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, said that she had seen movies that were worse, but Wild 90 was “the worst movie that I’ve stayed to see all the way through. It’s terrible in ways that are portentous.” Mailer said that the reviews were good for him. “I thought I was going to get a very pleasant reception,” he said. “Instead, I got cockamamied in the alley. Bam! Boom! Boy, those mothers! I found out it was a tough racket.” He had an idea for a second film dealing with the relationship of the police and criminals, an idea that grew out of being interrogated at the West 100th Street police station after the stabbing. But he had to take a break from filmmaking. He had another commitment.
When he left for Provincetown in mid-May, his plan was to return to “First-Born.” The previous summer Scott Meredith had gotten him a $450,000 advance from New American Library for a novel. It was an enormous sum that strengthened his faith in Meredith’s abilities. Mailer had been spending the advance freely, but had produced nothing. He had provided NAL neither an outline nor a sample chapter, only a line in the contract describing a novel about the “Jewish experience.” According to Meredith, Mailer “was going to follow a Jewish family like the Mailer family from ancient times to the future.” But he was unable to write. Bill Walker, his old drinking buddy, wrote from prison, and Mailer wrote back to send him a check; he added that he usually had trouble getting anything done while waiting for the appearance of a new book (Why Are We in Vietnam?). Another reason, he told Carpenter, was that he had gotten “far too concerned” with his movies: “It’s such fun making movies.” And it kept him away from his wife. He and Beverly had “fallen on dull, chilly days,” and he kept slipping away to New York to edit the film. Even the news that Styron was publishing a major new novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, failed to put him in a competitive mood. He told Knox that Styron was “putting out peace feelers to him,” but he was not receptive. He was concerned about Jones, however. His new novel, Go to the Widow-Maker, had been pummeled in the reviews. Mailer asked Knox to tell Jones that he planned to read the novel and to ignore the reviews. He added that he had a hunch that the reason the critics had been so hard on Jones was because he had praised him so highly in Cannibals and Christians. He knew this sounded like “paranoia, megalomania,” but he sensed that “all those little fucks out there” were dying to prove Norman Mailer wrong.
Even as he was trying and failing to extend “First-Born,” and sporadically editing the film, he had several other projects percolating. The first concerned Malaquais. A few weeks before leaving for Cape Cod, he had awakened one morning with “an extraordinary idea.” On the spot, he wrote to his friend in France and offered him $6,000 for a year’s full-time work. He outlined the job: a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination based on a careful rereading of the Warren Commission Report. His hunch was that the murder had been committed by one or more petty conspirators, and Oswald, probably an agent for the FBI and the CIA, as well as a couple of foreign countries, was one of them. The commission’s proceedings, therefore, were “a series of attempts to conceal by multitudinous layers of meaningless evidence the simple contradictions attaching to the embarrassments of the various secret policemen when lo and behold one of their boys seemed to be at the gun.” In addition to the $6,000, he offered him the profits of any book that might come of his “detective” work, as he called it. It was Malaquais, he reminded him, who had recited Trotsky’s dictum: find the truth by comparing the lies. Malaquais accepted and Mailer mailed him his review of Rush to Judgment, the first time he called the work of the commission a cover-up.
Mailer had done the Playboy interview with Paul Carroll, and in July one of the magazine’s top editors sent him the edited version for his approval, saying that Mailer was too “metaphorical” and “elliptical” in places. In his reply, he said that, yes, it was true that he was “far from crystal-clear.” He was not disposed to elaborate, however, merely to please the readers of the magazine. He had avoided writing for Playboy until recently, he said, because of “the literality, blandness, and overdedicated organizational exposition of the magazine’s style.” He preferred to write pieces that made readers work a bit to understand; he wanted them to be “slightly puzzled and slightly nettled” at certain points. Playboy backed off and the interview, one of his most important, with extended comments on Vietnam, appeared in January 1968. He was also asked to review a new book by Norman Podhoretz, a memoir titled Making It. Shortly afterward, Podhoretz, who was now, along with Cy Rembar and Steven Marcus, one of Mailer’s literary executors, brought a copy to Provincetown. Mailer read it forthwith and told Podhoretz that he liked it, but also had some criticisms. But, with other projects pending, he would not write his review for several months.
The first reviews of Why Are We in Vietnam? began to appear just as the Mailers returned to New York in fall 1967. They were almost as good as for Cannibals and Christians, with John Aldridge in Harper’s and reviewers in the Voice, New York Times, Newsweek, and The New York Review of Books proclaiming the novel to be a near-masterpiece. Favorable comparisons with Joyce were made, but there were the usual detractors. Saturday Review’s Granville Hicks was grave in his disapprobation of “the proportion of the once forbidden Anglo-Saxon monosyllables to other and more conventional words.” National Review was outraged, and Time’s anonymous reviewer found the book to be “a wildly turgid monologorrhea” narrated by D.J. The novel, however, has two narrators, D.J., or Ranald David Jethroe, a white teenager from Dallas who claims to be “Disc Jockey to the world,” and his alter ego, a crippled black “genius brain from Harlem pretending to write a white man’s fink fuck book.” The chapters alternate between the two. Both use a superabundance of scatological humor, and we never learn which narrator is wearing the mask, or if both are. “The fact of the matter,” D.J. says, “is that you’re up tight with a mystery, me, and this mystery can’t be solved because I’m in the center of it, and I don’t comprehend, not necessarily, I could be traducing myself.” The two narrators relish the mixup.
But what many reviewer
s found more compelling than his scatological ventriloquisms was what Denis Donoghue called Mailer’s “remarkable feeling for the sensory event.” One such passage comes after Tex has shot a wolf and Big Ollie, the Indian guide, gives him and D.J. a cup of blood to drink. It had “a taste of fish, odd enough, and salt, near to oyster sauce and then the taste of wild meat like an eye looking at you in the center of a midnight fire.” Big Ollie takes a taste of the blood, and then cuts the head off and turns it for them to see.
There were two eyes open on El Lobo, both yellow coals of light, but one eye was Signor Lupo, the crazy magician in the wolf, and his eye had the pain of the madman who knows there’s a better world but he is excluded, and then the other eye, Willie Wolf, like a fox’s eye, full of sunlight and peace, a harvest sun on late afternoon field, shit! it was just an animal eye like the glass they use for an eye in a trophy, no expression, hollow peace maybe, and Big Ollie dug a shallow pan of a hole with his knife in the crust bog tundra, whatever that dry shit moss was, and set the wolf’s head in it, muzzle pointing to the north, and covered it over. Then he took a broken twig and laid it in a line with the end of the muzzle, but pointing further North, then got down on his hands and knees and touched his nose to the stick.
Ollie has paid his respects to the wolf. How Mailer was able to imagine this scene after only five days in Alaska two years earlier is a mystery and a marvel. As Henry James said when asked for advice to novelists, “Write from experience, and experience only, I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Why Are We in Vietnam? was later nominated for the National Book Award, a reflection not only of its moving depiction of the Alaska wilderness, but also its implicit antiwar message which was beginning to be heard. Vietnam is mentioned on the novel’s last page, when we learn that Tex and D.J. have enlisted and are going to Vietnam.
In early October he started work on the new film, Beyond the Law. He coproduced it with Farbar (although Mailer put up all the money), and is listed in the credits as the director, although there was no script and almost no direction given. Actors were given an identity and told to wing it. Joining Pennebaker were two new filmmakers, Jan Welt and Nicholas Proferes. As with Wild 90, it was shot over four nights, but this time Mailer used three film crews and reliable sound equipment. The lead, played by Mailer, is an Irish-American vice squad lieutenant, Francis Xavier Pope, and one camera crew moves with him as he makes his station house rounds on a weekend evening. The other two crews worked simultaneously in other parts of the building, meaning that interrogations going on in one part of the precinct were interrupted by loud interactions in other parts. “The intensity of this process,” Mailer wrote, “camera, actors, and scenes working simultaneously on the same floor (which is about the way matters proceed in a police station) conceivably worked a magic on the actors.” He thought that he had “divined and/or blundered onto the making of the best American movie about the police he had ever seen.” His fundamental idea, which grows out of his existentialism, was that “people who were able to talk themselves in and out of trouble,” if allowed to speak naturally in certain situations, and not required to memorize anything, could turn in unusual performances.
The cast included several professionals—Rip Torn (a freaked-out Hells Angel), Beverly (Pope’s wife), and Knox (another detective)—and two dozen more, all amateurs. Buzz Farbar also played a detective; George Plimpton was the mayor of New York, inspecting the precinct; playwright Jack Richardson was impressive as an icy gambler; and Mailer’s Provincetown friend poet Eddie Bonetti was a convincing ax murderer. Michael McClure was another Hells Angel, and a stockbroker, Tom Quinn, was the station sergeant. A young woman named Lee Roscoe, who would work closely with Mailer on his next film and with whom he had an affair, played a college girl who was a weekend dominatrix. Hal Conrad and his wife, Mara Lynn, had parts, as did Torres and two other boxers, Roger Donoghue and Joe Shaw, a rising welterweight. Tom Quinn, along with Mailer, Pete Hamill, Plimpton, and a few others, were for a time Shaw’s financial backers, although his career was brief. The cast, therefore, was a haphazard olio of writers, actors, lovers, poets, gamblers, and boxers. Mailer drew on Brendan Behan’s persona for his role. In his review, Roger Ebert said, “He’s not only convinced that he can act, but that he can play an Irish cop named Francis Xavier Pope and do it with an Irish accent. He can do none of the three,” but watching him try is a “hilarious spectacle.” Vincent Canby found Mailer to be “slightly manic” in a film that was “good and tough and entertaining” in its presentation of “the existential relationship between cop and crook,” and compared it favorably to recent Hollywood detective films. Pennebaker said that the film influenced scriptwriters for television dramas (Hill Street Blues and Law and Order come to mind), and that it was “a real course in filmmaking for Hollywood” because it demonstrated how the cops “are sort of a counterpart to the crooks. Both sides are both good and bad.”
WILD 90 WAS more or less finished by the time Beyond the Law was shot, and Mailer was eager to begin editing the new film. He had reduced the eleven hours of raw footage by half when he got a call from Mitchell Goodman, an old friend from Paris with a “lugubrious conscience.” Goodman wanted him to take part in an antiwar protest in Washington in October. When Mailer said he had no desire to stand around listening to dull speeches by pacifists, Goodman said this protest would be different. The plan was to “invade the corridors of the Pentagon” to try to shut it down. In the opening of his account of the March on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night, Mailer wrote that Goodman’s words gave him no pleasure; he sensed “one little bubble of fear tilt somewhere about the solar plexus.” Despite his reservations, he agreed to participate.
Edward de Grazia, a lawyer he had met in Boston when testifying for Naked Lunch, was also involved in the March. He picked up Mailer at the airport on October 19, two days before the March, and while driving him to his Washington hotel, the Hay-Adams, explained the situation. There was no central organizing committee, no hierarchy, and relations among the participating groups were strained. Communication was spotty, although there was agreement on a kickoff rally for the March at the Lincoln Memorial, similar to the gathering four years earlier where Martin Luther King had given his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Negotiations with the various governmental units on all aspects of the protest were ongoing, but meanwhile fifty thousand or more marchers were en route to the city. Also on their way were U.S. marshals, the National Guard, and regular army units, all to reinforce Washington police. At this point, de Grazia said, things “are not in focus.”
Neither was Mailer. On the one hand, he was being compared to Joyce as a literary artist and called a sage for his subtle intimations of the nation’s fears, follies, and enervating addictions. On the other, he was thought to be a loose cannon, vulgar, violent, and weird, spouting ideas about orgasms and existentialism that resembled the most outrageous theories of Wilhelm Reich. While there was some consistency to his jeremiads, there was little among his novels, which appeared to have been written by five different novelists, and his poems by some mutant offspring of William Burroughs and Ogden Nash. He counted Bill Buckley as one of his best friends, but he was also close to Jerry Rubin and later Abbie Hoffman, although he was critical of some of the actions of the Yippies (Youth International Party), an anarchist group that Rubin and Hoffman helped found at the end of 1967. A convicted felon and multiply divorced, he was the devoted father of six. He had irreproachable antiwar credentials that made him a hero among the young, but he wore three-piece suits made in London. He was “modestly promiscuous” in his drinking and use of marijuana, but made his daughter Susan, now a freshman at Barnard, promise she would use no drugs until she graduated. The jacket of Why Are We in Vietnam? showed two photos of him, one with a terrific shiner, and the other with his hair as neatly coiffed as his father’s. Beneath was a question, “Will the Real Norm
an Mailer Please Stand Up?” One of Mailer’s ancillary purposes in writing The Armies of the Night was to do something about his image, not smooth the wrinkles—he loved his contradictions too much—but give his audience a few metaphors for appreciating what he called his “endless blendings of virtue and corruption.”
In the opening pages of Armies of the Night, after a quick sketch of the rival factions of his psyche, he describes his attempts to shape the way he is seen by the media.
He had in fact learned to live in the sarcophagus of his image—at night, in his sleep, he might dart out and paint improvements on the sarcophagus. During the day, while he was helpless, newspapermen and other assorted bravos of the media and the literary world would carve ugly pictures on the living tomb of his legend. Of necessity, part of Mailer’s remaining funds of sensitivity went right into the war of supporting his image and working for it.
The passage captures his testy relations with the media, but also reveals that the health of his self-image relied to some extent on blandishments from his dreaming self, his unconscious.
In the “leisurely twilight,” as Ed de Grazia drives him to the Hay-Adams, Mailer observed the “tender Southern city” and sighed, for “like most New Yorkers, he usually felt small in Washington.” There was no thought in his head about his centrality to the upcoming events, nor that he would write the definitive account of them, and none whatsoever that to do so he would borrow a form used by Emerson and Thoreau, described by critic Warner Berthoff as “the exploratory personal testament in which the writer describes how he has turned his life into a practical moral experiment and put it out at wager according to the chances, and against the odds, peculiar to the public character of his time.” Mailer merely wanted to do his bit in D.C., get arrested for the cause, pay his fine, and fly back to New York on Saturday night for an important party.
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