Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Sparring with Torres the previous summer had led to a detached retina, and on April 7 he went to a Boston hospital for an operation. Carol recalled that when she entered his darkened room, “I felt his pain. It was intense. I sat down next to him and in a few minutes, he turned to me and said, ‘I know what you are doing. It’s working. The pain is leaving my body, but be careful. You can hurt yourself.’ I was astounded that he immediately knew that I was working to take away his pain.” Mailer attributed psychic powers to Carol and said her singing could cure cancer. He called her a white witch. After the operation he wrote to Yamanishi about the difficulty of writing a novel “with very little tradition or precedent to help one along.” His plan was to continue on the novel until the Democratic convention in Miami Beach in July, write his account over a two-week period, and do the same at the end of September for the Republican convention, also in Miami Beach. By this time he had written sixty thousand words on the Egyptian novel. Just before he left, he wrote to Lucid, inviting him to come to Maine to read the opening chapters. “I promise you, the new book is going to take the top of your head off,” he said. “These pioneer works are pissers.” Lucid, with the help of Fan Mailer, had recently begun organizing and storing Mailer’s papers and putting them in storage, and their friendship had deepened. He would be one of the first to read Mailer’s new work for the next thirty-five years.

  THE UPCOMING ELECTIONS, Mailer believed, would be “the most exciting American election in my memory.” He told Yamanishi, “There is a new mood in America these days,” he said, and while Nixon was strong, “McGovern will prove no Goldwater and easily could win.” His victory would “carry the disease to a higher level,” for the right would mobilize against the idealistic and radical elements in his politics. He was wrong about the Johnson-Goldwater race in 1964, and just as wrong about the Nixon-McGovern race in 1972. Goldwater had won six states; McGovern won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He was defeated by 18 million votes, the worst popular vote defeat in any presidential election. There was indeed a new mood in America, but it was not radical. Assassinations and antiwar activism, and some of the excesses of the Woodstock Generation, as it was now called, had moved the nation toward conservatism, although the pendulum would swing the other way after the Watergate scandal. While Mailer would continue to prognosticate, he never felt in touch with the 1970s. At the beginning of the decade, he had written to Allen Ginsberg that he was constantly being asked what he thought it would be like. “I don’t have the remotest idea,” he said. “We were sure of what would happen in the 60’s and we weren’t far from wrong. The 70’s are just a fearful blank to me.”

  In early June he, Carol, and Maggie drove to Maine from Provincetown, again renting the Thomas house on Somes Sound. The children arrived when school was out. Right after the July 4th weekend, Mailer left for the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. He had begun an affair with Suzanne Nye, a young woman who had done secretarial work for him, and it had moved beyond casual. She joined him in Miami. Compared to its predecessor, the 1972 convention was a subdued affair. At the end of July, Life published “The Evil in the Room,” the first part of his report on the conventions.

  This report, while full of keen-eyed portraits of notable Democrats at the convention, is hobbled by the lack of any real convention drama. Some of McGovern’s supporters tried to pass platform planks supporting in various ways drug users, draft evaders, and women’s reproductive rights—“acid, amnesty and abortion,” as the platform was crudely described—but these were easily defeated, despite the energies of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and others who feared the coming of a corporate, technocratic world. The Democratic Party was weak; fissiparous forces were afoot. And the nation itself was also divided. “Out in America, far beyond Miami, lived a dull damp wad of the electorate,” Mailer wrote. “They often did not vote. It took no ordinary issue to fire their seat.” But they would stand strong against unsanctioned sex, proscribe marijuana, condemn welfare, and look with disfavor upon concessions to Black Power. They were against much and for little, and perhaps could only hold hands on the flag, the family, and the nation’s military. They were the Silent Majority of Richard Nixon.

  Most of the remainder of his account of the conventions—published in book form by New American Library as St. George and the Godfather—is devoted to the unrepentant chicanery of President Nixon, the ultimate, brilliant, political puppeteer, and his consummate control of the Republican convention. This portion of the book was published in The New York Review of Books under the title “The Genius,” accompanied by a David Levine ink sketch of Nixon scrubbing up in a bathtub full of blood, the caricaturist’s response to the savage bombings of Cambodia and Laos. Nearly five million were killed, wounded, or became refugees under Nixon—a million more than under Johnson. Mailer likens the U.S. bombing to the irrationality of “a man who walks across his home town to defecate each night on the lawn of a stranger—it is the same stranger each night.” Yet the president retained the support of a majority.

  Nixon was the artist who had discovered the laws of vibration in all the frozen congelations of the mediocre. Other politicians obviously made their crude appeal to the lowest instinct of the wad, and once in a while a music man like George C. Wallace could get them to dance, but only Nixon had thought to look for the harmonics of the mediocre, the miniscule dynamic in the overbearing static, the discovery that this inert lump which resided in the bend of the duodenum of the great American political river was more than just an indigestible political mass suspended between stomach and bowel but had indeed its own capacity to quiver and creep and crawl and bestir itself to vote if worked upon with unremitting care and no relaxation of control.

  He finished writing St. George and the Godfather in late August, just in time to move to a shingled, three-story house on five acres in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He paid $75,000 ($60,000 mortgage) for the large rambling place. Carol did not like the house and begged him not to close on it. “The house had negative vibrations,” she said. Later, she learned that a number of couples who had lived in the house had gotten divorced. But Mailer was adamant. There was room enough for all of his children, and it was not a long drive to New York in his Porsche. He now owned three homes: 565 Commercial Street in Provincetown, where Beverly lived most of the time with the two boys, 142 Columbia Heights, and the new place in the Berkshires.

  The only way for St. George and the Godfather to influence the election was for it to be published in paperback. Mailer agreed, hoping it could appear in mid-October, at the latest, three weeks before election day on November 7. In late September he left on a thirty-day, twenty-college speaking tour to publicize the new book and earn approximately $50,000 to stanch his financial bleeding. He complained more than once during the tour about the delay in getting the book to bookstores. “Book publishers are all Democrats,” he said, “and distributors all Republicans.” It finally appeared at the end of October.

  At every college, his audience brought up his opposition to Women’s Liberation. When he felt feisty, he brought it up first. He usually stated, as he did at Towson State in Baltimore, that he agreed with “the body of demands that ask for equity,” but disagreed with the movement’s “sexual ideals.” He also complained that women would not enter into a dialogue with him, which he called “potentially totalitarian.” This college tour went west, with stops at San Francisco State (where he saw Lois Wilson), and the University of California, Berkeley. At this stop, Mailer began by asking the feminists in the audience to hiss. When they did, he said, “Obedient little bitches,” which drew laughs and more hisses. He then went on, according to a news report, to deliver an electrifying speech, “dumping poisonous invective on just about every aspect of the feminist movement and gleefully one-upping most of the epithets that his audience snarled back at him.” In the course of the speech, he said that “a little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul.” Whatever the context, the line was widely reported
and cemented his position as the bête noir of Women’s Liberation. Time ran it, unadorned, as the beginning of its “People” squib on the speech in the November 6 issue. He wrote a letter, complaining as he had in the past, about being quoted out of context. But he had said it and the damage was done.

  Barney had been treated for cancer for several months, and on October 12, when Mailer was speaking in New Orleans, he died. Suzanne Nye was with him when he got the news. He came back for the funeral service and interment at the cemetery in Long Branch where Fan’s parents were buried. Shortly after the funeral, an elderly woman showed up at Fan’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights. She had a signed note from the secretive Barney, notarized, for $26,000 that he owed. Mailer recalled discussing it with his mother. “I think we have to pay it,” he said. “My mother didn’t altogether want to pay it. He just charmed her [the woman]; I just know it.” The family paid. Mailer had made Barney the dedicatee of St. George and the Godfather. His father, eighty-one, died two weeks before Mailer could put a copy in his hands.

  TEN

  THE TURN TO BIOGRAPHY

  When Mailer was in New York, he often ate and socialized at Elaine’s, an Upper East Side restaurant popular with people in the arts. Plimpton, Talese, and other writers had made the place a sort of clubhouse. Celebrities such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dined there; Woody Allen had his own table (no. 8), and might give you a glance as you passed it on the way to the restrooms, or to “Siberia,” the back dining room where tourists were exiled. During a visit to the city in November 1972, Mailer had dinner there with Jeanne Campbell and Frank Crowther, a Paris Review editor and freelance publicity agent. They suggested that he organize some sort of bash for his fiftieth birthday. Mailer was opposed, saying, “Another ego trip. Who needs it?”

  A short time later, he was at another dinner at another favorite restaurant, Vincent Rao’s on 114th Street in East Harlem, with independent filmmaker John Cassavetes and Larry Schiller, a journalist and media entrepreneur. Schiller had agreed to pay Mailer $50,000 to write a preface to a collection of photographs of Marilyn Monroe that he had assembled for an exhibition earlier that year. Mailer brought up the birthday party idea and mentioned his huge alimony and child care expenses. A few days later Schiller called to propose that Mailer charge admission as a way of generating some income. It was the first of many financial schemes he would suggest to Mailer over the next thirty-five years. Mailer liked the suggestion. Celebrities typically pay for attendance at such events with their presence. Members of the Fourth Estate wouldn’t pay on principle. For this party, everyone, even his ex-wives, had to purchase a ticket—$30 a person, $50 a couple. Some friends—Kurt Vonnegut and Rip Torn, for example—refused to pay and stayed home. Fan Mailer said to Larry Schiller, “All these people are paying to see my son. I see him all the time for nothing.”

  Mailer called the project the Fifth Estate, but gave no details, promising to make “an announcement of national importance (major)” at the event. In December five thousand invitations were mailed out for the February 5 party at the Four Seasons restaurant on Park Avenue. Working out of a rented office at the Algonquin Hotel, Campbell and Crowther made all the arrangements. Crowther described the event as “a family and literary event—a night for the written word,” which only increased speculation. Would Mailer make a serious proposal, or was it a ploy to raise money for alimony, or to send his children to college? Perhaps it was Mailer’s answer to Capote’s Black and White Ball (Capote didn’t attend Mailer’s party). Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggested that Mailer was going to announce his vasectomy. As the night of the party neared, interest surged and there was a last-minute run on tickets. Calls came in asking what to wear—the invitation said “finery.” Mailer’s new secretary, Molly Malone Cook, bought an ankle-length pink gown and dyed her prematurely white hair black. She and her partner, poet Mary Oliver, also in a gown, drove in from Provincetown. Later, “in a rare tender moment,” Oliver recalled, Mailer told them how touched he was by their thoughtfulness. Mailer and Carol drove down from Stockbridge, arriving at noon. The party began at ten P.M. and almost everyone came on time.

  Close to six hundred people attended, including Senator Jacob and Marion Javits and Senator Eugene McCarthy; Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Rod Steiger were part of the Hollywood contingent; Larry L. King, Larry McMurtry, and Jessica Mitford were three of the many writers. Dotson Rader came with Princess Diane von Furstenberg; Elaine Kaufman, owner of Elaine’s, was there; Plimpton, Andy Warhol, and cabaret singer Bobby Short. The major gossip columnists and reporters showed up, grudgingly in some cases. Dorothy Schiff, owner of the New York Post, came, but Gloria Steinem did not. She called and left a message for Mailer: “Tell Norman it’s been a breathless 10 years.” The Mailer family was represented by Fan, Al, and Barbara, Mailer’s four eldest daughters, ex-wives Jeanne and Adele, and current partner, Carol, whom Mailer was now calling his fifth wife although they weren’t married. His assistant, Suzanne Nye, in a low-cut satin dress, was at his side during the evening. Everyone drank and nibbled for close to two hours. The Voice’s reporter watched the swirling crowd: “At its center was sure to be Norman Mailer, in the flesh, feet wide planted, drink in hand, finger jabbing chests or tits or air, sterling silver Brillo pad hair bobbing up and down to the rhythm of the crowd he had drawn, pink face-a-pulsing, vibrating jigsaw puzzle impossible to assemble without first killing the man, making him quiet and still.” At midnight, Jimmy Breslin introduced Mailer as “one of the half dozen original thinkers of this century.”

  Mailer began with a dirty joke concerning the respective lengths and depths of male and female genitalia. He began to lose the audience. He maundered. He was, as he said the next day, “a hint too drunk.” Finally, the announcement: the Fifth Estate would be a people’s organization to track and publish the activities of the FBI and the CIA in the wake of the emerging Watergate scandal—the burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., the previous June. “If we have a democratic secret police keeping tabs on Washington’s secret police, which is not democratic but bureaucratic, we will see how far paranoia is justified.” Sally Quinn, the Washington Post’s reporter, summarized what followed: “He digressed, with a few attacks on the press. He used words like ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘plots,’ ‘Kennedy assassination,’ ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ ‘sober organization,’ ‘bugging.’ A few people began hissing and walking out.”

  There were some shouted questions and catcalls as he warned of the nation’s drift toward totalitarianism, but the crowd was ebbing away. Adele shouted, “You blew it, Norman.” He ended by saying that he planned to form a steering committee in the near future, and left the podium saying he would return in thirty minutes for discussion. Applause was light. Crowther told him to save his remarks for the press conference at the Algonquin Hotel the following day. Mailer acquiesced. At 2:30 in the morning, he was drunk and disconsolate: “I have a demon inside me,” he said. The next day, the Algonquin was packed with TV cameras and reporters.

  Mailer had a hangover. It was a “terrible mistake” to call the Fifth Estate “a democratic secret police,” he told the media. What he was really proposing, he explained, was an organization like the American Civil Liberties Union. He wanted it to be staffed by “the best literary, scholarly and detective minds,” and serve as a kind of national ombudsman in a “morally dastardly” country, one that should take a long, hard look at the events of the recent past to determine if government conspiracies existed. He had no desire to head the organization, but would like to have “an umbilical relationship with it.” After expenses, the party netted only $600.

  A year earlier, Wilfrid Sheed, a novelist and essayist, had written a magazine piece titled “Norman Mailer: Genius or Nothing,” which argued that Mailer “has caught every fashion at its crest.” He ended the essay: “He gives himself unstintingly, opening his lungs to experience with a romantic willingness that comes close to being noble . . . a weather vane with t
hat kind of accuracy is something to prize. Watch Mailer: if he turns to contemplation, buy a prayer mat; if he stays with politics, expect huge voter turnouts. As Mailer goes, so goes the nation. That is the form his genius takes.” But after the embarrassing failure of the birthday party, and despite his sober and reasoned explanation of the Fifth Estate idea the next day, it seemed as if he had lost his bellwether status. Even some of his friends piled on. Pete Hamill said that “the best writer in America was reduced to the role of a nightclub comic”; Shirley MacLaine called the party “a disaster,” although she felt Mailer’s concerns were on target. John Leonard, editor of The New York Times Book Review, said that as proposed, Mailer’s idea was “just another vigilante group.” Like MacLaine, Rader also felt Mailer was on to something, but after the party, he said, “there was a general feeling around New York that Norman Mailer was nuts, and getting nuttier, poor old Norman, he shouldn’t drink so much . . . the journalists I talked to put Mailer down, some of them viciously, and most of them said Watergate was nothing, it would blow away.”

  On February 7, the day after Mailer’s press conference, the Senate voted to create the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North Carolina, and co-chaired by Howard Baker, Republican of Tennessee, to investigate the Watergate burglary. This action was prompted in large part by the reporting in The Washington Post of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. On the same day some of President Nixon’s officials met to cover up the forthcoming investigation, as later revealed by White House counsel John Dean. By the third week in April, Dean and Attorney General John Mitchell were implicated in the cover-up, and slowly but thoroughly the cover-up was exposed. Nixon writhed and prevaricated, but on August 9, 1974, he became the first U.S. president to resign. As these events unfolded, Mailer’s warnings were reevaluated.