Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  A master of the close-up, Leone could also film haunting images of lonely desert places, but as Knox explained, “Mailer’s screenplay gave Leone a dish he couldn’t possibly eat; it had serious social content.” Shortly afterward, the Italian magazine Express ran a spurious account of Mailer’s time in Rome. The article quoted Leone’s partner, Alberto Grimaldi, who said that Mailer had been living in a hotel room with an eighteen-year-old girl and had written the script on toilet paper. It was so poorly done, Grimaldi said, that no payment was warranted. Knox was furious and grilled Grimaldi, who insisted that the magazine had made up the story. The matter ended in a standoff, and Mailer and Norris flew home. Peter Bogdanovich and another director, William Friedkin, read the script at Mailer’s request and pronounced it worthy, whereupon Mailer sued for payment. Several years later, the Italians were ordered to pay, but much of the money went to lawyers. With the help of several writers, Leone came up with a new script, and with Robert De Niro in the lead role Once Upon a Time in America, Leone’s last film, was released in 1984.

  THROUGH MAILER, NORRIS had become friendly with the wife of fashion photographer Milton Greene, who ran a Manhattan beauty shop. Amy Greene told her that if she lost fifteen pounds and got a portfolio of photographs together, she would introduce her to Wilhelmina Cooper, who ran one of the leading model agencies in New York. Norris dutifully brought her weight down and went for an interview. “Trying not to look like a girl from Arkansas, full of foreboding about being turned down,” she presented her portfolio of head shots taken in Rome, along with others by Milton Greene, who had been one of Marilyn Monroe’s favorite photographers. She was accepted and began modeling right away. Mailer was pleased that she had stopped talking about going for an MFA and had started a new career.

  It was Mailer who came up with the professional name Norris Church. She first used it in a letter to him in August 1975 when she went back to Arkansas to sell her house and furniture. Later, with his help, she wrote an article for Cosmopolitan about how she had gotten started. He liked her new name, she wrote in her memoir, and was “thrilled” that his “Henry Higgins strategy was paying off.” Even with the new income, Norris had to take money from him for expenses, especially after Matt began living with her. “In the beginning I pretended it was a loan I would pay back, but he just laughed and said don’t worry about it. That was one thing about Norman, he was generous to a fault. Not only with me but with all the kids and exes.” In December, Mailer wrote to Aunt Moos to tell her about “a tall lovely red-haired model whom you would find divine.” The affair was over; a long-term relationship was now under way.

  Through the fall, he shuttled between Stockbridge and Brooklyn. He explained to Carol that he had promised Norris that he would move permanently by New Year’s Eve. He spent Christmas in Stockbridge, and most of the children visited. A few days later, he said goodbye. He told her that the relationship with her was the deepest he had ever had, but he wanted to be with Norris. “Let me have my starlet,” he said. He left Carol his Porsche and borrowed her larger car. With all the children, including Maggie, (Nannie) Myrtle and the dog, he drove off, leaving her alone in the big house on the hill. At the beginning of the year, Norris moved into Mailer’s apartment. Carol was stricken. She remembered taking long drives in the country and crying.

  He now worked steadily on the Egyptian novel. He found it easy to reengage, partly because of his excitement in writing about the ancient civilization’s carnal spirituality, partly because there was ample space for his imagination to wander among the dynasties, and partly because he was distressed with American culture. As he told Aunt Moos, the still unnamed book “is like a good wife and I am like a drunken sea captain on a three-year cruise.” His metaphor may also reflect the thinking he was doing, now that Norris had moved in, about marriage and fidelity. He wrote to another correspondent about how he was meditating on “the possibility of committing oneself to one mate, taking the good with the bad.” He had wondered if his newfound fidelity was part of a reaction to “an entire era of narcissism which began after World War II.” His early years with Norris were his most monogamous since his early years with Bea. As long as he was working on Ancient Evenings, he was faithful—mainly. Norris always said it was her favorite book. She loved its exoticism, and it was written during the happiest time of their marriage. While she cleaned and redecorated the apartment, he worked, often in a small aerie twenty feet above.

  In late February 1976, Mailer received the Gold Medal for Literature from the National Arts Club, where he was extolled by Bob Lucid and Steven Marcus. In his acceptance remarks, he lamented the difficulties of fiction writing at present. “The nature of existence cannot be felt anymore,” he said. “As novelists, we cannot locate our center of values.” He echoed these remarks two months later at the National Book Awards ceremony. William Gaddis won the fiction award in 1976 for his novel JR, a brilliant, nearly formless work described by one critic as a novel of “waste, flux and chaos,” much in the mode of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which had won the NBA three years earlier. Entropy is abundant in both novels, and Mailer loathed it. (A few years later when he was asked about Pynchon, he said he was “either a genius or vastly overrated.”) The “psychological demeanment” and “gloom” and “corruption of self” a writer must face, he said to the NBA audience, comes from maintaining that one’s “vision will possess illimitable value.” Art is the product of struggle, and great art comes from titanic struggle.

  Mailer wanted his books to be the literary equivalent of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, or Picasso’s Guernica, works that would alter the course of artistic history. In the early decades, he was pushing into unexplored territory—sex, violence, revolution—but in later years he was upping the aesthetic ante, trying to reshape narrative forms in both fiction and nonfiction, while delivering to the country a deeper vision of itself. This is one of the reasons he was always unable to complete volume two of the several multinovel schemes he laid out for himself. He conceived of vast projects that would shift consciousness, change lives, revamp narrative modes. Consequently, when the first novel in a sequence was not all he hoped it would be, he abandoned the scheme and sought a new one. For the Egyptian novel he created the largest expectations, raised the bar to its highest, and for a decade advertised his forthcoming leap.

  WITHOUT MAILER’S KNOWLEDGE, an excerpt from his commentary in Genius and Lust was published in the Los Angeles Times at the end of March, and Miller wrote to him with thanks. The French think they are marvelous critics, Miller said, “but believe me, none that I read ever came near you for originality, muscularity or wind power.” He encouraged Mailer to keep writing, not about movie stars and boxers, but “just about yourself, Life.” Mailer thanked him and said that whenever he was down on himself as a novelist, he concluded, “ruefully,” that his last career may be literary critic. His commentary on Miller’s oeuvre, eighty-eight pages of a 576-page book, is as much biography as it is literary commentary, but this is as it should be in discussing Miller, a writer who saw no distinction between fiction and memoir and was usually the central character of his own books.

  Miller’s self-assurance impressed Mailer. “He has such an extravagant sense of mission that his presence is palpable,” and what is on his mind at any moment is “vastly more real than any of the people who come and go in his life,” a comment that could be applied to Mailer, who was similarly enraptured. Miller’s lack of qualms, guilt, and doubts about his genius, and his escape from his puritanical family, were the foundation of his power, although Mailer must have swallowed hard when he wrote this line: “One had to go back to Melville to find a rhetoric which could prove as noble under full sail.” Yet, when one reads the passages Mailer chose from ten of Miller’s books (for example, the opening of Tropic of Cancer, and his description in Sexus of the first time he met “Mona,” his second wife, June Edith Smith), the following celebration of Miller’s prose does not seem exaggerated.

&n
bsp; Miller at his best wrote a prose grander than Faulkner’s, and wilder—the good reader is revolved in a farrago of light with words heavy as velvet, brilliant as gems, eruptions of thought cover the page. You could be in the vortex of one of Turner’s oceanic holocausts when the sun shines in the very center of the storm. No, there is nothing like Henry Miller when he gets rolling. Men with literary styles as full as Hawthorne’s appear by comparison stripped of their rich language, stripped as an AP style book; one has to take the English language back to Marlowe and Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity.

  Mailer posed this literary test: what would happen if Miller, Hemingway, and Henry James had to write about a character who “entered a town house, removed his hat, and found crap on his head?” James would have been paralyzed, Mailer says, unlike Stendhal, Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky, and “Hemingway would have been bothered more than he liked,” whereas “Miller bounces in the stink.” If Hemingway thrived, for a time, in an earlier world of “individual effort, liquor, and tragic wounds,” Miller was at home in a later one, “the big-city garbage can of bruises, migraines, static, mood chemicals, amnesia, absurd relations and cancer. Down in the sewers of existence where the cancer was being cooked, Miller was cavorting.” Mailer found such cockroach vitality to be “inestimable.”

  When he looks at the narcissism of Miller and June, there are echoes of his “Cinnamon Brown” letter to Norris, the one in which he foresees their double selves in an upward spiral of excitation and challenge. Miller is the first American, he says, to explore “the uncharted negotiations of the psyche when two narcissists take the vow of love.” The key passage not only demystifies Miller’s 1,600-page, three-decker novel (Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus) about his obsessive love for June, it is also an excellent précis of Mailer’s “Lipton’s Journal” that tells us as much about Mailer’s own inner life as anything he ever wrote.

  The narcissist suffers from too much inner dialogue. The eye of one’s consciousness is forever looking at one’s own action. Yet these words turn us away from the psychic reality. The narcissist is not self-absorbed so much as one self is absorbed in studying the other. The narcissist is the scientist and the experiment in one. Other people exist for their ability to excite one presence or another in oneself. And are valued for that. Are even loved for that. Of course, they are loved as an actor loves an audience. Since the amount of stimulation we may offer ourselves is obviously limited, the underlying problem of the narcissist is boredom. So there are feverish and/or violent attempts to shift the given, to alter the context in which one self is forever regarding the other. It is a reason why narcissists are forever falling in and out of love, jobs, places and addictions. Promiscuity is the happy opportunity to try a new role. Vanity is the antidote to claustrophobia.

  For June, “every day is a scenario,” and the question of whether she loves Miller is moot; if there is a part for a lover in that day’s script, she might. None of her lives are “more real to her than last year’s role for an actor.” Her repertoire kept Miller on the balls of his feet for thirty years, trying to understand and to play opposite. “To be living as a detective one day and as a criminal the next is to keep one’s interest in one’s own personality alive.”

  Mailer was looking for something close to this in his relationship with Norris. The repertoire of roles is much different, given the life circumstances and ambitions of the two couples, but the dynamics of the two relationships are congruent, or so he hoped. This is what Mailer meant in the letter where he tells her that he loves the two ladies ensconced in her, “because there’s one of them for each of me.” It will be easier, of course, if Norris develops new identities to match the mutations he will doubtless undergo. If they can make it, perhaps he will not feel compelled to improve his image in his books, at least not as much as before they fell in love. Norris did change, and over the years of their marriage made serious and successful attempts at modeling, acting, painting and writing, and this versatility is one of the most important reasons why she was, as she always said when asked, the last Mrs. Norman Mailer. But there are other reasons, all to be explored. He probably wrote his letter to Norris before writing the narcissism passage, but we can’t say for sure. It is possible that he had not even read The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy by that time. But it doesn’t matter. He had these ideas long before he took on Miller. Meeting Norris and reading Miller were double confirmation, always the best kind for him.

  Mailer told Miller that he expected to be attacked by Miller’s supporters and rightly so for “putting much of myself into you. It is the technique by which I work and I’ve never pretended to hide it. When I wrote about Marilyn Monroe I tried to understand her with that part of her I felt was similar to myself. I’ve made the same attempt with you,” he said, and thought he had come even closer, given their Brooklyn background, his appreciation of Miller’s style, and even the similar ways their names were spelled. He added some comments about his own writing, saying he was “guessing what Egypt conceivably might be like, and for that I have a few clues,” one of them being the similarity of Egyptian theology and his own. On the day of his letter, May 25, 1976, he had written 130,000 words, and had, he told Miller, 350,000 to 400,000 to go.

  For sixteen years, since 1960, Mailer had written about the quadrennial political conventions, but he lacked enthusiasm to do this in 1976. The advances from Little, Brown, he calculated, would exceed anything he could earn in piecemeal journalism, and he saw “a path through my financial difficulties.” He had written one piece that spring, “A Harlot High and Low,” which holds up for puzzled scrutiny shards of evidence pointing to the CIA’s involvement in the Watergate break-in. But the piece, published in New York, never coheres, and resembles a pile of research notes. There were far too many tendrils of fact, rumor, and supposition surrounding Watergate than could be dealt with in a twenty-page magazine article. He saw that fathoming the CIA’s role in American life could only be addressed in a longer work, and he already had one massive narrative on his hands. Another reason to step away from journalism was his growing confidence about the novel. After writing hundreds of pages about Egypt, “I’ve finally come to a place where I think I understand what I’m up to,” he told Yamanishi.

  FOR HIS FIRST summer with Norris and the children, Mailer rented a place in Wellfleet, a short drive from Provincetown. The house was in a salt marsh on Lieutenant Island and could be reached only at low tide, which required planning. Danielle, Betsy, and Kate, who by this time, Norris said, saw her “as something between a girlfriend and an older sister,” helped with the cooking and laundry. Michael and Stephen “were normal rowdy boys who half loved me and half were wary of me,” Norris wrote, “now that I was the figure of authority. The kids really knew after that summer that the guard had changed.” The family took long hikes, went swimming and canoeing, and occasionally went into P-Town for dinner. Carol was scheduled to visit the house and Norris was nervous. Mailer had “talked about her constantly,” Norris said, “and she had achieved epic status in my imagination. I knew she was a great beauty.” When she arrived, Norris thought she resembled Elizabeth Taylor. They liked each other, and although there was mutual jealousy for some years, they eventually settled into a warm friendship.

  That summer, Jimmy Carter of Georgia won the Democratic nomination for president. Shortly after the July convention, The New York Times Magazine asked Mailer to profile Carter, and he accepted, traveling to Plains, Georgia. The resulting profile, which he wrote in “a towering depression,” was published in the Times on September 26. Mailer had only a few hours with the candidate, and wasted a lot of it “haranguing a future president” about “the insuperable complexities of moral examination opened by Kierkegaard,” the putative benefits of the sexual revolution, and whether Carter had given much thought to “the possibility that Satanism was loose in the twentieth century.” Carter smiled at these questions; he wanted to talk about politics and programs, not the affairs of th
e universe. Mailer left the interview with “the twice dull sense that he liked Carter more than Carter had any reason to like him.” He wrote to Knox that the piece had elicited warm congratulations from many New Yorkers, and he said that the piece had helped elect Carter. Later, he thought less of it and did not include it in his next collection of essays, Pieces and Pontifications.

  Genius and Lust was generally ignored, especially after William Gass in the Times Book Review called Mailer’s judgments on Miller “romantically overblown.” There was little advertising and only a modest publication party. Norris turned heads at the event.

  In December he and Norris threw a party at the Columbia Heights apartment to mark the first wedding anniversary of Dick and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Norris described the party in A Ticket to the Circus: “The room was so packed that nobody could move. Drinks were passed overhead through the crowd, and the guests had to link arms to get their drinks to their mouths.” She made a massive bowl of coleslaw, along with ham and beans and corn muffins, but most of it was untouched; drink flowed. Jacqueline Onassis, a friend of the Goodwins, came, as did Pat Kennedy Lawford, Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger, Dick Cavett and his wife, Carrie Nye, and a number of writers, including Kurt Vonnegut and his wife, photographer Jill Krementz. Bob Dylan arrived with an entourage but kept to himself, as Mailer later remembered. Hunter Thompson was one of the last to leave, but returned at six A.M. and asked Norris to make him eggs and bacon. She said he looked “as if his very life hinged on those eggs and bacon,” and she cooked for him. He then fell asleep in the hammock under the skylight until mid-afternoon. It was, in effect, Norris’s coming out party in New York, and she made several friendships that lasted for years.