He saw her a couple of months later in Little Rock, where Norris had reserved a room at the Sheraton. Fig and Ecey were not told of the visit. He bought her a ring that she didn’t take off for a long time. With Matthew, age three and a half, staying overnight with her parents, Norris felt uninhibited; she was drawn to a man unlike anyone she had ever met. It wasn’t just physical; she admired his running commentary on everything under the sun. But the sexual connection was strong. “Through the years, no matter the circumstances of our passions and rages, our boredoms, angers, and betrayals large and small, sex was the cord that bound us together,” she later wrote. They both realized after the two nights they spent together in Little Rock that their interlude could develop into a full-blown relationship.
Norris was twenty-six, exactly half his age. An Arkansas Tech graduate in art and English, she had worked in a pickle factory, as a bookkeeper, and as a high school teacher. Married at twenty to her college boyfriend, Larry Norris, she was divorced at twenty-five. She had never been away from home. In her memoir, A Ticket to the Circus, she lists the “firsts” she achieved while getting to know Mailer: flying in an airplane, riding in a cab, drinking red wine, hearing live jazz, eating real Chinese food, and seeing Chicago and New York. She savored it all, although she was a bit intimidated at times, especially by her first visit to a jazz club. Carol was a well-known jazz artist and when Mailer introduced Norris to saxophonist Sonny Stitt, she felt like “an interloper” in Carol’s world. But with her height, high cheekbones, and cascading red hair, the former Little Miss Little Rock was usually the most beautiful woman in the room. “I instinctively knew that Norman needed a strong, confident woman, and that was what I was determined to be,” she wrote.
Scott Fitzgerald said that the sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to function while holding opposed ideas in mind. By this measure, Mailer was a genius. After he became involved with Norris, he had to balance more irreconcilables—in love, family, and work—than ever before. His private life, he wrote to Susan, “has erupted all over the place.” Half of him was exhilarated by the challenges; the other half was in the dumps. Smitten by Norris, he felt a deep attachment to Carol, but was not quite ready to break off with Suzanne. There were other women as well: Lois Wilson; Shari Rothe, a flight attendant; and Carol Holmes, a former student of Bob Lucid’s he was seeing in New York. He had also had a brief affair with Barbara Probst Solomon, a dear old friend of his and his sister’s. He had made a good start on the Egyptian novel, but was enamored of several new projects and not merely for financial reasons. All the while, he had the children with him at the Thomas house in Maine, as well as Carol (still in the dark about Norris), his mother, and nanny Myrtle Bennett, who helped keep the household running. He was appearing on talk shows, giving interviews, and doing readings to promote The Fight. Molly Cook and Mary Oliver were running his business affairs from Provincetown, and he was on the telephone with them constantly. His relations with Beverly were “harrowing,” he told Knox, and he stopped talking to her on the phone because “she’d end up shrieking.” To call Norris or Suzanne, he had to go to a phone booth. His situation during the summer of 1975 might be compared to his analogy for Ali on the ropes: riding a unicycle on a parapet.
NOT LONG AFTER Mailer met Norris, Barney Rosset of Grove Press contacted him about doing an anthology of Henry Miller’s work. Mailer, ever in need of ready money, jumped at the advance of $50,000, to be divided with Miller. For all of that summer, whenever he wasn’t hiking or sailing with the kids, or entertaining guests, or keeping peace among his far-flung harem, he was rereading Miller’s books, beginning with Tropic of Cancer. Another project was editing a collection of his essays on political conventions, entitled Some Honorable Men, which would be published the following year. He swore that when he completed work on the collection and the Miller book, he would return to the novel “before its spirit begins to expire.” Despite this promise, he began talking to director Peter Bogdanovich about making a movie based on An American Dream. He wanted Cybill Shepherd, who had been in Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and Daisy Miller, to play Cherry. The lure of film remained strong, but the project died aborning.
In mid-1975, the IRS began putting levies on his income to satisfy back taxes of $60,000. His other debts amounted to $140,000. He still had some shares in The Village Voice, but had been unable to find a buyer. When the paper was sold to Clay Felker, Mailer got exactly enough from the proceeds, he thought, to pay off the government. “So I’m half breathing now, which is to say I got one lung back,” he wrote to Larry L. King in July, adding that he would like to declare bankruptcy. “The only trouble is that the people I owe the money to I happen to be real fond of—like my mother.” Then, about six weeks later, he learned that he owed another $100,000 in taxes. This was a heavy blow, because he was living on what came in each month. “I’m really going to have to change my life style from top to bottom,” he wrote to Knox, and “it’s depressing because I have no habits for worrying about money.” A big score was needed.
Norris knew nothing of her lover’s finances. His letters to her were vague about everything except his passionate feelings. Memories of their last tryst and plans for the next one filled pages. “For the first time in my life I don’t want to possess my woman’s soul,” he wrote at the end of July after she had made her first trip to New York. “I want to have all of you, and we’ve gone so far already, but only at your rate.” But after he had said goodbye to her, he got depressed, he wrote, by “the heavy and crossed responsibilities of my life.”
I knew all we needed was twelve hours of sleep and we would be ready to explore into one another again for another week, and instead I was going to be throwing all the switches and working and playing with the children—that special species of work—and being considerate to Carol and missing you, missing your redheaded angelic insanity and your tender sense of the next move—little Miss I Ching of Spring meeting Old Hard-Heart’s Ice, yes, it is new air to breathe when one is around you, and then I always hate good-byes in airports.
Norris’s letters matched his for ardor.
I at last have found someone who is just a little tougher than I am, smarter than I am, and who can love with a passion and tenderness equal (at least) to everything I have to give. I love you. I believe with everything in me that we would be happy together. We feed each other—the monstrous egos that ride both our backs—the hot sexual needs that rise a little hotter each time we meet—the tenderness and love that is given and taken and in the process grows double its size. We are good for each other.
As the relationship grew, Mailer recommended that Norris (Mailer always called her Barbara) read D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, with its frank examination of sexual relationships. His vision of the love he hoped to achieve with her owed something to the dynamics of Lawrence’s. “So often,” he wrote, “one finds love, and then looks for a cave where one can feast on it—soon such love grows stale.” He didn’t want that; he wanted a love that they each deserved, a love that would put “every demand on us—because for once, I want to be in love without guilt, and want a woman to love me without guilt.” She was in love with a man who had two selves, he wrote, and they corresponded to her own two. The first he called Cinnamon Brown.
That’s your other female, the tall jaunty slightly mysterious woman who can’t walk into a bar without turning it on since there’s a sexual voltage comes off you then which you may even be unaware, and it says, “I want to fuck. I want to fuck the most exciting man in the house, whoever he is, because that is the most natural expression for whatever peculiar reason I’m here,” and that lady, of course, is a distance away from Barbara who is looking to have one love till she dies and wants to make an art of that love so that she gives strength and gains strength and tenderness passes forward and back. And I, of course, love those ladies because there’s one of them for each of me, Barbara for Norman since he is probably as tender as she is (that is saying a lot) an
d as much in love with the religion of love which is to make it with one’s mate and thereby come out to a place very few people visit and you can be true to that idea of love; then another side not so different from Cinnamon, a cold creation full of lust who might just as well have a name like Ace or Duke or some such hard-cock name far from Norman—and yet not a bad side, no worse than Cinnamon, for so much of the action is there, even an instinct for some of the better adventures.
I used to be that way when I was twenty-six; I still am. One past needs to be in love—the other can remain in love only so long as the love keeps changing, and so if it is the same woman, the ante keeps rising. There has to be more and more. Of course one cannot always name what more might be—it is rather that one has to believe it is possible. Then the two sides of my nature come together.
He invited Norris to come to New York, to “try it for a while,” and sent her a plane ticket. No promises; it was an experiment. Matthew would remain with her parents for a few months until she got a job. Norris, an only child, said that her mother cried and then asked what kind of woman she was “to turn from all the people who love her?” Her father, a heavy equipment operator just a year older than Mailer, took it better, but “deep down he is very hurt,” she said. Norris told her parents that she would be living in an apartment near Mailer’s, “which would give Mother and Daddy the illusion that I wasn’t living in sin, although I certainly would be.” The cover story for Mailer’s family was that Norris was Fig’s niece and was looking for a modeling job in New York, which was half true. She arrived in mid-August, and he came down from Maine for a week to help her get settled. A couple of months later, Norris rented a small apartment in Fan’s building on Willow Street, a five-minute walk from 142 Columbia Heights.
Remembering Norris’s first months in New York, Barbara said, “I always tried to be totally nonjudgmental about Norman’s newest woman; I didn’t want to not like them.” In Norris’s case, she had no reservations. “It was absolutely extraordinary that one could be that beautiful and that nice.” The arrival of Norris on the scene changed things, she explained. “She had that wonderful joie de vivre, really. She just loved the family; she made everybody feel life was fun. She was enjoying herself. And she was tough. For instance, the relationship between Michael, Stephen, and Matt [Norris’s son] was very difficult at first, but she managed to cope with it.” It was easier with the girls, she said. “They got along famously—a lot of girl stuff.” Fan also hit it off with Norris. “I’m sure they had a lot of questions,” Norris recalled, “but refrained from asking them.” She continued her masquerade as a country girl looking for a job. “No one mentioned his wife,” she recalled.
In Maine, he continued work on the Miller book, which he thought would present no problems. When he did encounter trouble, he wrote to Norris, it made him remember what Ali had told him: “There are no easy fights. The easy ones become the tough ones.” Miller’s work, in Mailer’s view, was radically uneven, and exasperatingly difficult to characterize. But as he told Norris, except for the lost time, he didn’t mind the effort, because Miller “is the ideal subject whenever I become too in love with love, for he’s in love with cunt—a healthy corrective: I start thinking of Big Red and her Arkansas gold.” He continued work on the Miller book through the summer.
In the fall, he had the difficult conversation with Carol. He told her that he was in love with Norris and wanted to move from Stockbridge at the end of 1975. According to Mary Oliver, it was Molly Cook who made the difficult call to Suzanne Nye.
A few months before he died, Mailer spoke of the reasons for his breakup with Carol. He said that part of it was Stockbridge. The town is the home of the Tanglewood festivals, and many of the locals were musical, not literary. Mailer said he didn’t know anything about classical music and “found them a dull gang, essentially.” There was more, as he explained.
I was bored due to the fact that my life was dwindling into less and less, or so it seemed. Carol had no interest in a social life, so that was the beginning of the heart of inactivity to me in the marriage. It would have kept us together, and sexually we were fine, too, so it was a lovely marriage in that one way and that was enough for a long time because as the years went by, it built and built. But, finally, when I met Norris, there was no question that I wanted to move, and did. This was the one marriage that broke up that I’d say that I broke up—that I felt bad about. Felt bad about leaving Maggie, felt bad about deserting Carol, who had never done me any harm.
There was another element, he said. “As a novelist, I thought, ‘I’m not learning anything. If I don’t learn anything, I’ll dry up.’ That was terribly important. And, of course, Norris just filled it all up. And was beautiful as well.” In addition, she “loved” the social life in New York, and had been a successful schoolteacher, so “to take care of six of my kids was nothing.” Carol said that she never stopped loving Mailer, and after a time, began seeing him again, just as she had when he was living with Beverly.
He divided his time between Stockbridge and New York. Now that Carol knew about Norris, Mailer began to introduce her to his children. Stephen remembers meeting her in Provincetown. He was nine and Michael was eleven. “We were at Ciro’s and Sal’s for dinner and she walked in with Molly and Mary and my Dad. He might have introduced her as a friend of theirs. I thought she was great. She was beautiful, and a lot of fun. She was wearing a great hat.” Danielle remembers that at that time she and her sister “were very jagged and spinning out of control,” and Norris was very calm. We were “overly analytical and second-guessing. I don’t think she had that fault. She was very direct.”
The relationship with Norris was difficult for Susan. “She [Norris] was so young and beautiful. Dad and I always had this thing with looks. I think I look most like him in many ways—in terms of physical appearance, my height, my eyes,” and her father, she said, “was always finding fault with the way I looked. That’s what I felt. I didn’t dress well; I wasn’t chic; I wasn’t this, I wasn’t that, my hair, my friends. So in walks this beautiful model and I had a shit fit.” It was more of a shock for her than for her siblings, she said, because she and Norris were the same age. At first, she thought it might be just “another of Dad’s love affairs,” but then, over a couple of months, she changed her mind. “Norris was really nice. There was something very sweet and earnest about her. She really tried hard; she reached out, and so I got to know her.”
NORRIS WAS PLEASED when Mailer asked her to go with him to the Philippines for the third and final match—“The Thrilla in Manila”—between Ali and Frazier, on October 1. He was uncertain about writing about it, but the chance to see the landscape where he had fought three decades earlier appealed to him. After a twenty-two-hour flight, they arrived. Norris remembers that her clothes were rumpled. The first person they saw as they walked into the airport was Larry Schiller, who was photographing the fight for Time. Schiller had just changed money, and offered them a stack of Philippine pesos for dollars. Mailer, always wary of Schiller’s schemes, hesitated, but then exchanged the money (and later learned it was a fair deal). Schiller was surprised to see him with a new woman. “Lo and behold, there’s Norman with this knockout chick who’s taller than him. He’s got this chick on his arm.” Mailer introduced her, “Here’s my girl,” Schiller recalled, and “the way he says it is like, ‘What do you think?’ You know? And I say to myself, ‘What a pair of legs.’ ” Schiller, Norris wrote in her memoir, “would figure in our lives over and over throughout the years.”
Mailer wanted to try to find the village outside Manila where he had spent time during the war, and they took the highway south out of Manila and drove until there was no road. “There was like a little pig trail that went through the jungle,” Norris recalled. “We were in this huge limousine going through this jungle with the leaves slapping on each side of the car and there’s all these huts with reed ceilings and fronds and a village store.” He thought he recognized a large tr
ee in the center of a field where his unit had bivouacked in 1945, and “in the spirit of the occasion, we pulled out a picnic basket, spread a cloth on the grass, and had a picnic under the tree that once had (maybe) sheltered a young Norman Mailer when he was hatching the plot for The Naked and the Dead.” They spent a week in the Philippines, and saw Ali retain his crown in a bruising fifteen-round fight. Mailer decided not to write about it; he had to finish his book on Miller.
The original title was Mailer on Miller, but he decided against foregrounding himself—another sign of his diminishing self-interest—and changed it to Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller. He completed it shortly after he returned. Because of difficulties obtaining permissions for the excerpts for the collection, the Miller book did not appear until the fall of 1976. He had hoped to get back to the Egyptian novel, but he had agreed to write a film script, his maiden effort in the genre. It had to be written rapidly, and in Italy.
In late October, he and Norris flew to Rome. Knox had recommended Mailer to Sergio Leone, the maestro of spaghetti westerns, as the perfect person to adapt a novel by Harry Grey, The Hoods, about Prohibition-era Jewish gangsters in New York. Leone offered him $75,000, a sum that would pay off most of his IRS bill. He thought he could write it in a month. During the day, he worked at Leone’s office while Norris explored the city. They spent evenings with Mickey Knox. He introduced them to a fashion designer, Angelo Litrico, who made Mailer a beautiful blue velvet suit. Midway through their stay, Leone said that he wanted enough material for two films, the first one to be called Once Upon a Time in America. Mailer made the necessary adjustments and two weeks later turned in a script of two-hundred-plus pages. He thought the script contained “some of my best dialogue,” but Leone was unimpressed.
Norman Mailer Page 62