Despite an imperfect sound system, the premiere at Notre Dame was a success. It held an audience of 3,500, mainly undergraduate students, to the end and boosted Mailer’s cinematic ambitions. But a few months later when the film was shown at the New York Film Festival, a significant number of people walked out of Philharmonic Hall, reacting to its violence and obscenity. One critic said in his review that Mailer didn’t understand the movies. Unlike novels, the unnamed critic said, “the movies are not there to hit people where they live. The movies are there to keep people alive.” Mailer said that this was true in the past, but in the late 1960s “the horror of life has become so completely pervasive” that this sort of emotional nourishment was beside the point; filmgoers needed to be jolted. Nevertheless, he learned something from his first two films, namely, that he hadn’t given himself utterly to filmmaking. “Making movies is a religious act,” he said, and up to now, “I’ve just been having an affair with movies.” At some point, he said, he was going to have to choose between writing and marrying the movies.
Beyond the Law lost money just as handily as Wild 90—over $70,000—although it continued to play to receptive audiences on the college circuit. Its appeal, Mailer felt, lay in his vision of getting “below the reality, beneath the reality, within the reality of an evening in the police station.” The relationship of cops and criminals is incredible, he said. “No one’s ever begun to deal with how fantastic they are in their love-hate relationship.” According to Michael Chaiken, Beyond the Law worked because the film had a baseline premise: “people were pegged either a cop or a criminal.” Wild 90, on the other hand, was less successful because of its “anything-goes-bottomless quality.” Mailer’s cast in Beyond the Law, however, “could easily tap into the cops-and-crooks scenario because in personal moments we’re all questioning our own kind of morals and integrity. Mailer found a group of people who were able to draw out things that were very truthful for them.” Chaiken added that he thinks that Mailer’s experience at Actors Studio enabled him to do a superb job of casting.
All told, he spent nearly eight months editing Beyond the Law, four times as long as he had spent writing Armies of the Night. Between editing stints, he continued to give time to the antiwar effort, but he had much else on his agenda. Jack Newfield wrote a piece for The Village Voice about a day in the life of “Norman Mailer, novelist, counter-puncher, filmmaker, mayoral candidate, stud, essayist, egomaniac, and successor to Whitman and Henry James as American Zeitgeist.” On the day in question, May 24, 1968, after several hours of editing, he met with Tom Hayden, one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, and asked for his help in meeting Castro. “I want a guarantee,” he said, “man to man, that I can see Fidel.” Then Mailer went to a cocktail party at Dwight Macdonald’s apartment, where he met Mark Rudd and other members of SDS. He said he didn’t agree with everything SDS was doing, but he gave them a check because “they are an active principle. They are taking chances.” From Macdonald’s, he went to a taping of The Merv Griffin Show, where Griffin announced him by saying, “Norman Mailer is one of the leading spectator sports in America.” He walked on stage, Newfield wrote, “hunching up his shoulders like Carmen Basilio coming to Ray Robinson.” Afterward, he attended the light heavyweight championship match at Madison Square Garden between Bob Foster and Dick Tiger (who had taken away José Torres’s title in December 1966), which Foster won. After midnight, Mailer climbed over a fifteen-foot fence to confer with Mark Rudd and the other students who had recently taken over the administrative offices of Columbia University, an event that reverberated at campuses across the nation.
Preoccupied as he was with Beyond the Law, Mailer got an idea for a new film in June. The nation was still in mourning for Martin Luther King, shot to death on April 4, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated shortly after midnight on June 5, just after he won the Democratic presidential primary in California. Two days earlier Andy Warhol had been shot four times at his studio and almost died. Over the next few days, as the country fell into a state of horror and confusion, Mailer conceived of Maidstone. The new film, he wrote, was calling to him “with every stimulus and every fear.” Named after a fictional estate on Long Island where the events unfold, the film focuses on a famous-infamous director. Norman T. Kingsley is “one of fifty men who America in her bewilderment and profound demoralization might be contemplating as a possible President.” In Armies of the Night Mailer admitted that except for JFK, “there had not been a President of the United States nor even a candidate since the Second World War whom Mailer secretly considered more suitable than himself.” Kingsley’s ambition is similarly large, but the chain of assassinations had unnerved the country, and he believed he could be next. To guard against attack, he is watched by a super-secret police agency called Protection Against Assassination Experiments-Control (PAX-C). We soon learn, however, that some of the agency’s operatives seem just as interested in assassinating Kingsley as protecting him. This could be paranoia or it could be genuine—there are contradictory hints. Mailer himself did not know. Carol Stevens, who had a role in the film, said that the mood on the set was “unbelievably paranoiac.” Again, there was no script, just a situation.
The situation within the situation is a film Kingsley plans to make about a male brothel located at Maidstone; much of the action—there isn’t much—consists of the director interviewing young actresses to play the role of brothel customers. There is another shadowy group of men at Maidstone, the Cashbox, consisting of male prostitutes who are almost as portentous as PAX-C. The two groups overlap. Kingsley’s half-brother, Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (played by Rip Torn), is either completely loyal to Kingsley or tempted to kill him. He runs the Cashbox (Buzz Farbar and Eddie Bonetti play the roles of key members). The rest of the cast of fifty to sixty—the numbers change as people drop in and out over the week—include Beverly Bentley, who plays Kingsley’s estranged wife; two women Mailer was having affairs with, Lee Roscoe and Shari Rothe, who are two of the “belles”; Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, who plays a member of the local gentry; and Robert David Lion Gardiner, who owned one of the estates. Jeanne Campbell plays a major role as a British television reporter, and Adeline Naiman is a college president. A number of other friends, including Anne Barry, Paul Carroll, Michael McClure, Torres, Lucid, and Noel Parmentel Jr. have roles, as do Hervé, the dwarf from Fantasy Island, and Ultra Violet, a Warhol “superstar.” Several film crews, led by Pennebaker, Nick Proferes, Jan Welt, and one of Mailer’s Harvard classmates, Richard Leacock, filmed the action using handheld cameras and color film over five days in late July on four different estates in or around East Hampton, Long Island.
James Toback, who later made a number of important films and was influenced by Mailer, wrote a long piece about the making of the film for Esquire. He described what he saw when he visited the set.
There was a fair amount of tension all through the whole shoot and I would say that he was never in control in the way a director is normally in control of a set. First of all, the set was all sprawled out; things were being shot all over the place. People were inventing things at the last minute. So it wasn’t subject to any of the normal protections that a director has if in fact he wants to keep control of a set. I don’t think Norman minded it at all, I think that was part of the idea. But there was, I would say without sounding too melodramatic about it, there was a danger in the air.
Mailer had deliberately created this mood, and made it “tacitly understood” that O’Houlihan was free to threaten or attack Kingsley if the situation called for it. Mailer had told the cast, after all, that they were “a bunch of enforced existentialists.” Torn plays his role perfectly and never looks less than ominous, especially on the last night of shooting when he and Mailer, dressed in formal clothes and top hats, attend “The Assassination Ball,” along with most of the cast. Torn-O’Houlihan debates whether to strike; it seems imminent. But the moment passes.
The next day, the last day of sho
oting, Torn struck. Most of the cast and camera crews had departed, and Mailer and Beverly are walking with four of their children, Betsy, Kate, Michael, and Stephen, through a field on Gardiners Island, an actual island owned by the Gardiner family. The children were eight, five, four, and two, respectively. Pennebaker is following them, recording what appears to be a summer idyll. With no warning, Torn, who had been off in the distance, comes running at them, full tilt, with a hammer in his hand. He strikes Mailer in the head twice and blood flows. Beverly screams; Mailer bellows, “You crazy fool cocksucker”; the children cry in terror. Torn-O’Houlihan, still holding the hammer, comes forward and speaks: “You’re supposed to die, Mr. Kingsley. You must die, not Mailer, I don’t want to kill Mailer, but I must kill Kingsley in this picture.” The real and the fictional merge. The two men wrestle and roll on the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear. More blood, more screams; Beverly cries like a wolverine. Finally, with her help, the two men are separated, and after mutual recriminations, they part. Mailer tells Torn he is taking the scene out of the film.
But on reflection, he changes his mind, realizing that he was complicit, if not directly responsible, for what happened. Through the fall of 1968 and into the first half of 1969, he watched the forty-five hours of film shot by the five crews. To his dismay, he discovers that only six or seven hours are usable. He has given too much autonomy to the camera crews and casts, and most of the good material, “all too unhappily,” centers on Kingsley. When he realizes that there is too much Kingsley in the raw footage, he concludes, reluctantly at first, but then unequivocally, that “Torn had therefore been right to make his attack.” He proceeds to make the fight the violent culmination of all the whispering and plotting and knowing looks that precede it.
For the next three years, working with two professionals, Jan Welt and Lana Jokel, Mailer devoted more time to editing Maidstone than to anything else. He continued to write and produced three books—two of them major works, Miami and the Siege of Chicago and Of a Fire on the Moon—and also ran for mayor of New York in the 1969 Democratic primary. Film became his passion, however. Just as Henry James, discouraged after years of novel writing, sought in the 1890s to begin a more lucrative, exciting career in the theater, Mailer in the late 1960s considered shelving, or even giving up, the solitary work of a writer to become a producer-director. He imagined himself about to join the company of the period’s great directors—Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni, among them. When he read Toback’s Esquire article about the filming of Maidstone, “At Play in the Fields of the Bored,” he was unhappy with it. “When we discussed it,” Toback recalled, “he said that he thought that I had taken him too lightly, that it was the first thing to appear in print about him as a director and the result of the article was to encourage that part of the journalistic community that was always ready to make fun of Norman, always ready to take him with a grain of salt, to ridicule him, to mock him. He felt that ideally I would have been writing about him as the American Godard. Instead, I gave ammunition to his enemies.” Mailer later saw the merit of the article and got Toback’s permission to reprint it as a preface to Maidstone: A Mystery.
Another reason for Mailer’s fascination with film is that it was challenging the dominant narrative mode, the novel. His films are of continuing interest, Chaiken said, because “they’re part of a certain conversation that was happening in New York City at that time about direct cinema and the new American cinema of Shirley Clarke and John Cassavetes. His films are in there with the stuff Andy Warhol was doing, the stuff Jonas Mekas was showing at the Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque—Norman’s films are absolutely part of that conversation. He was throwing his hat into that ring and was going for something that was unique. He was turning direct cinema on its head. He was using documentary techniques to film quasi-fictitious situations.” By the 1960s, film was challenging the novel and Mailer wanted to be a player, Chaiken said. His reputation, coupled with New York City’s position as a filmmaking incubator, generated tremendous media interest in Maidstone. An early version of it was shown in Provincetown in August 1970, and at the Venice Film Festival later the same month. When Mailer arrived in Italy with Carol Stevens—he and Beverly separated in the fall of 1969—he said, “We came here to try to pick up the marbles.” The film did not win a prize, however.
At its showing two months later at the London Film Festival, billed as its world premiere, there were huge crowds. He told Knox that he “drew more than anybody in the whole festival, including the personal appearances of Taylor and Burton. (Which last gives me delight, I confess it.)” But the acoustics were bad and the audience was restless, and when it was over, Mailer appeared on stage, much as Henry James had after the premiere of Guy Domville seventy-five years earlier. James was hooted off the stage and subsequently gave up the theater. Mailer said the dialogue with his crowd “came under the head[ing] of free swinging.” One voice from the dark asked, “With all this money to throw around, couldn’t you make a film with some content?” Mailer retorted, “I’d rather make a movie to agitate than fortify the far recesses of your leaden brain.” Maidstone, he said, had “an esthetic coherence of a new order,” and demonstrated “new modes of perceiving reality.” But the audience’s comments stung him, and when he returned to the United States, he reedited the film. On September 22, 1971, the film had its American premiere at the Whitney Museum. It ran for ten days, three showings a day, in a small theater and drew seven thousand, a record attendance. But when it was shown commercially the next month, the audiences were tiny, and it folded. Mailer was confounded and asked a good friend to explain what had gone wrong. The friend said that there were seven thousand people in New York who were eager to see Maidstone, and they all saw it at the Whitney. Mailer later called it “my failed cinematic masterpiece.”
Within days of the end of shooting Maidstone, Mailer left to cover the Republican National Convention, August 5–8, in Miami, on assignment from Harper’s. Morris had promised him the same kind of space given to Armies, and Mailer needed income after spending $125,000 on the film. To raise this sum, he had sold a majority of his shares in The Village Voice. After Miami, he would have a two-week break, after which he planned to travel to Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention, August 26–29. The summer of 1968, he wrote at the beginning of Miami and Siege of Chicago, was a time when “the Republic hovered on the edge of revolution, nihilism, and lines of police on file to the horizon.” John Updike, who at the time resided in the suburbs of Mailer’s esteem, provided him with a line about the nation’s throes, made after Robert Kennedy was killed: “God may have withdrawn his blessing from America,” he said.
The two conventions could not have been more different. The Republicans were united and optimistic about their chances of winning the White House; the Democrats were bitter and divided over the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon had returned from the political graveyard after losing the race for governor of California in 1962, and had traveled the country for five years building support. Neither Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York nor Governor Ronald Reagan, both relative latecomers to the race, had sufficient backing to mount a real challenge to him. President Johnson’s decision not to seek renomination after only narrowly defeating Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota—an early and eloquent opponent of the war—in the New Hampshire primary, and Robert Kennedy’s assassination had fractured the Democrats and weakened their eventual, equivocating nominee, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Mailer’s report on the Miami convention contains the same sharp-etched character sketches as in Armies of the Night, and the same sure grasp of the currents of a large, multifaceted event. The currents, however, were turgid. There were no real surprises at the convention. One of the two most memorable patches of writing in part one, “Nixon in Miami,” is the examination of Nixon redux. Referring to himself as “the reporter,” Mailer admits he has never written anything favorable about him. “There had never been anyone in Americ
an life so resolutely phony as Richard Nixon, nor anyone so transcendentally successful by such means,” he wrote. And yet, “Tricky Dick” seemed to have changed. His dark-jowled face now revealed a hint of “inner debate about his value before eternity.” His appearance had shifted
from looking like an undertaker’s assistant to looking like an old con seriously determined to go respectable. The Old Nixon, which is to say the young Nixon, used to look, on clasping his hands before him, like a church usher (of the variety who would twist a boy’s ear after removing him from church). The older Nixon before the Press now—the new Nixon—had finally acquired some of the dignity of the old athlete and the old con—he had taken punishment, that was on his face now, he knew the detailed schedule of pain in a real loss.
The press was not admitted to the grand gala dinner at the Fontainebleau Hotel the night before the convention at which Nixon and his wife, Pat, received the guests, but by luck Mailer got into the room before it began. Seeing no place to stand unobserved, he took up a position before the main doors, standing at parade rest, as some two thousand delegates and their spouses strolled in. Posing as a security man, he scrutinized faces for thirty minutes. What he saw helped him understand why the new Nixon had such stout support.
Most of them were ill-proportioned in some part of their physique. Half must have been, of course, men and women over fifty and their bodies reflected the pull of their character. The dowager’s hump was common, and many a man had a flaccid paunch, but the collective tension was rather in the shoulders, in the girdling of the shoulders against anticipated lashings on the back, in the thrust forward of the neck, in the maintenance of the muscles of the mouth forever locked in readiness to bite the tough meat of resistance, in a posture forward from the hip since the small of the back was dependably stiff, loins and mind cut away from each other by some abyss between navel and hip.
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