AT THE END of the year, Herbert Mitgang profiled Mailer for The New York Times. Mailer told him that he was writing a multipart novel about Egypt as he conceived it might have been three millennia earlier, and his aspiration in writing it was “to go beyond one’s reach.” But he had to take on other work fairly regularly, he said. “You have to keep the bread coming in.” In December alone, three of his smaller pieces were published: an interview with one of Nixon’s top aides, John Ehrlichman, who was serving a prison term for his complicity in the Watergate cover-up; a preface to the memoir of Hemingway’s son Gregory; and a screenplay, “Trial of the Warlock,” based on Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1891 novel Lá-Bas. Mailer’s editor at Little, Brown was also interviewed for the Mitgang piece. He reported that Mailer was working “systematically” on the novel and had written more than 175,000 words.
Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature that fall, shortly after the publication of Humboldt’s Gift, and Mailer sent him a telegram of congratulations. “To my surprise,” he told Mitgang, “I felt good about Saul getting it, because he deserved it.” When Meyer Levin, an old friend and the author of several long novels about Jewish-Americans, asked if Bellow was his favorite author, Mailer said no, but his congratulations had been genuine, adding, “Obviously, others also deserved it. [Henry] Miller, Nabokov, Mailer, even old rat-fuck Meyer Levin.” Bellow’s Nobel was another spur to his commitment to the Egyptian novel. He wrote to Knox that he was “resisting intensely” excursions from it. “Can it be that I have at last turned a little serious?” he asked.
Robert Gorham Davis, Mailer’s Harvard instructor, read the Mitgang piece and wrote to ask if it were true that he was writing about the 19th Dynasty and the obscure pharaoh Ramses IX. Yes, Mailer replied; he had picked this pharaoh because of “the total inventive freedom” it provided. But as Mailer’s research continued, he got caught up in the life of another pharaoh, Ramses II, the most powerful and longest ruling (sixty-seven years) of all pharaohs, and his astounding victory over the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh, fought in 1274 B.C. on the banks of the Orontes River in what is now Syria. He decided to write about Ramses IX, but to accommodate his enthusiasm for the earlier Ramses (who sired over 150 children and created the colossal sculpted figures at Abu Simbel), Mailer was forced to resort to an awkward flashback, jumping back in time 150 years from the reign of Ramses IX to that of Ramses II. The bridge figure was a general of Ramses II, Menenhetet I, who had learned from a Hebrew slave how to procreate himself again and again, allowing him to know both pharaohs. The scheme created narrative lesions that weakened the novel, but it was the only way he could find to link the two pharaohs. He also told Davis that he planned to include a chapter on Moses, who purportedly lived in the reign of Ramses II (as depicted in the film The Ten Commandments, with Charlton Heston as a muscular Moses and Yul Brynner as an august Ramses), although few historians believe it.
The IRS still hounded him, and in a letter he told Susan that his best hope for getting out of debt was writing a book on Gary Gilmore, who was executed in Utah on January 17, 1977, the first legal execution in the United States in ten years. There are “plenty of pitfalls” to such a project, he said, but a large advance and the opportunity to write about Gilmore, a man who “fascinates me out of sight,” led him away from the novel once again. In retrospect, the repeated breaking of his resolve seems comic, but as he said more than once, the navigator embraced surprises.
ELEVEN
DEATH WISHES: GILMORE AND ABBOTT
Gary Gilmore was in the news at the end of 1976. The Utah double murderer had not merely acquiesced in his death sentence. Speaking to the judge at a subsequent hearing, he said, “You sentenced me to die. Unless it’s a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it.” His determination created consternation among those opposed to capital punishment, and cultish fascination among his admirers. He received over forty thousand letters during his final months, and his face was everywhere, including the cover of Newsweek, under the caption “Death Wish.” Mailer, like half the nation, was following the story. He recalled being struck by how handsome Gilmore was in photographs. “It was an arresting face, particularly that one shot, the famous one, of the long face,” he said. Legal maneuvers followed for months, and Gilmore tried twice to commit suicide. One of these attempts led to a memorable radio report: “Dr. L. Grant Christensen said Gilmore can leave the hospital and return to Death Row if he continues to improve.” His first suicide attempt was in tandem with that of a young woman, Nicole Baker Barrett. “Nicole and I have known and loved each other for thousands of years,” Gilmore said. She was young, beautiful, and devoted to him. Mailer found the story becoming more engrossing.
On the day of Gilmore’s execution, January 17, Mailer saw Larry Schiller on the evening news. “I could see he was going through something,” Mailer said. Two days later, Molly Cook told him that Schiller had called and “wants you to do some writing for him.” Schiller had already done interviews with many of those involved, including over thirty hours with Gilmore, to whom he paid $60,000 for exclusive access. In February, he sent Mailer an interview that he and Barry Farrell had done with Gilmore. It appeared in Playboy and was the longest interview that magazine had ever published. Mailer thought it might “be the best single interview of its sort I’ve ever read.” On March 4, he and Schiller signed a contract with Warner Books for their third collaboration. It called for eighty thousand words on “the life and death of Gary Gilmore,” to be submitted no later than March 1978.
The $500,000 advance for a paperback edition, divided 50-50 with Mailer, was negotiated by Schiller with Howard Kaminsky, editor in chief at Warner Books, which had published the paperback edition of Marilyn. This money, coupled with the proceeds from the pending sale of the lower floors of 142 Columbia Heights, gave Mailer the wherewithal to take another sabbatical from the Egyptian novel. He made plans to go to Utah. Little, Brown could not have been pleased about this turn of events, not given the amount of money the firm had invested in Ancient Evenings. The lurid media frenzy that had surrounded Gilmore—his execution was featured on the front page of the National Enquirer—did little to convince Arthur H. Thornhill, Little, Brown’s president, of the story’s literary merits, and at first the firm turned it down. As Schiller put it in a letter to Mailer, “I do not believe that Little, Brown took the book very seriously,” at least not initially. But Mailer was enthusiastic and ultimately the firm agreed to publish the hardcover version of the book.
The book was Schiller’s idea and he would not only provide the majority of the raw material, he would also have a hand in marketing the book. Meredith had told him that it would be difficult to convince publishers that Mailer could and would write a narrative. None of his recent books explored large swaths of society such as found in Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy, a book that would become one of Mailer’s models for The Executioner’s Song. “All he does is write these 30,000-word articles for Life and everybody else and then turns them into books,” Meredith told Schiller. “And some of them are good books, but he’s not writing narratives. They’re really big essays.” Schiller said, “I was lost—I don’t even know the difference.” But he was quick to grasp it and was careful to tell Kaminsky that Mailer intended to write a narrative, and thus the deal was struck. Mailer was unaware of this promise, and at the time had no sense of how he was going to structure the book, nor its tone, style, or length. He thought he could finish it in six months.
At first, he wanted to call the book “The Saint and the Psychopath.” Gilmore fit both roles perfectly, he thought. On the one hand he possessed “a deep vein of what’s commonly called criminality,” but he was not “an ordinary thug,” Mailer said. No, he had “a quality that was almost saintly.” His ability to rise above his situation and regard it with detachment was “extraordinary.” Initially, he thought he’d write a twenty-thousand-word essay and “cover the biography skimpily,” focusing on Gilmore’s belief
in karma and reincarnation. He “embodied many of the themes I’d been living with all my life,” Mailer said, and “was the perfect character for me.” He planned to scrutinize Gilmore’s choices: be executed and bolster his chance for reincarnation, or molder for thirty or forty years in prison and feel his soul slowly shrivel.
Schiller had been interviewing everyone who knew Gilmore and Nicole, and then sending the interviews to Mailer. “I’m inundating him with more and more interviews,” Schiller said. “I’m going on and on and I remember one time he does say to me, ‘Stop, stop, I’ve got enough to write a book!’ And I say, ‘No, we don’t have enough to tell the whole story.’ ” When Mailer did dig into the interviews, he recalled years later, he was “aghast because the material that was there was so rich and so deep and so full of a kind of American life that I knew only in passing from the Army, but didn’t really know, and there it was.” The book would have to be considerably different, and longer, than he had thought.
In late March of 1977, Nicole flew to New York with Schiller to meet Mailer. She had never been out of Utah, and they took her to Trader Vic’s for lunch. Then they all went ice skating in Central Park. From the start, Mailer had seen Gilmore as “a man who was quintessentially American and yet worthy of Dostoyevsky,” but when he met Nicole he saw that there was another dimension to the story, one vying for importance with Gilmore’s dead-serious insistence on execution. He explained her appeal to a Washington Post writer: “She’s been injured so much by life, and at the same time she’s so strong. I thought that she had such a life-force in her in a way, while at the same time such despair. To me, she’s a heroine in the old sense. She’s a protagonist.” Nicole recounted her life in many long interviews. She was “probably the most open person I’ve ever spoken with,” Schiller said, and was particularly frank about her sexual experiences with Gilmore and others. She was sexually abused when she was not yet a teenager and was the mother of two children before she was nineteen. She did not open up immediately, however. Schiller was patient.
After Gilmore’s execution, Schiller got Nicole released from a mental facility and moved her, along with her children and her mother, to a beach house in Malibu. He bought her a Great Dane puppy and paid her $25,000 for the rights to her story. Schiller’s wife, Stephanie, spent time with her and built a relationship. Then Schiller used the same method with her that he used with all the important characters in the book: he created what he called “a dictionary” of her life. “I listen more than I ask,” he explained. “When someone starts a sentence, let them finish the sentence, let them finish the paragraph. Never interrupt.” Everyone has their story, but nobody cares to listen. Except Schiller, as Mailer explained.
Very often an hour would go by before he would ask the first question about Gary Gilmore. These people had never been interviewed before in their lives, and they were having this incredible experience of talking about themselves, and having someone truly interested, or so it seemed, in everything they had to say. And so they went on and on and on, and by the time Larry got to Gary Gilmore, they were wide open, they were ready to tell all.
Mailer knew he had to get to Utah and get the feel of the local culture and the landscape, and sit in on interviews. He also wanted to visit the Oregon prison where Gilmore had done time. His March visit to Oregon State Prison and discussions with the warden, Wyatt Cupp, was the first of a number of visits to the place where Gilmore spent many years, and it enhanced Mailer’s understanding of prison life. In late May, he returned again for three weeks and met members of Gilmore’s and Nicole’s families. He stayed in the motel room where Gilmore had spent the night with Nicole’s sister, April, and met Gilmore’s uncle, Vern Damico, and Vern’s daughter, Brenda Nicol, who befriended Gilmore after his release from prison in April 1976 (he had served fifteen years for many crimes, including armed robbery). Norris went along with Mailer on some of his early visits to Utah, and he took her skiing. Never particularly athletic but always game, she managed, “not prettily,” to get down the slopes on her first try. They had now been living together for almost a year and a half, and the Mailer clan had accepted her and her son, Matt, whom Mailer treated as one of his own. “Our life was coalescing,” Norris said.
Confirmation can be seen in a letter he wrote to Carol Holmes, one of his former girlfriends. She had written him about a rumor, first reported in the New York Post, that Norris was pregnant. Mailer wrote an angry letter to the editor denying the report, and the Post printed a retraction. Mailer explained all this to Holmes and added that she might not be hearing from him in the near future, but “you need not take it amiss. I certainly liked the way you looked the last time I saw you. These however are odd years for me. I’m interested at last in the most difficult venture of all, fidelity.”
By this time, Norris wrote, she was handling “the minutiae” of Mailer’s daily life, as well as being a stepmother for however many children were living with them. As her best friend, Aurora Huston, said, “She was his practical side. He had no idea of the needs of the kids, problems with neighbors. She would tell him, ‘Norman, this or that has got to be done.’ She could put her foot down when she had to.” She had also begun to take over the finances. Norris and Molly Cook had not hit it off, and Mailer had become progressively unhappy with Cook. The sum of their differences finally led to what he called “a bloody rupture.” Norris took over the family finances for the remainder of their long relationship. In her memoir, she tells a story about needing something from Mailer one day early in their relationship. He was then working in a studio he had begun renting, an unfurnished third floor apartment about a block away from their apartment.
At the time I thought it was important, so I went and knocked on his door. He was not pleased. He said, “When I’m writing, pretend I have gone to South America. What would you do if I was in South America? You have a brain. You can deal with whatever comes up.” I apologized and said, “Okay,” and I never knocked on his door again. I realized then that he would never be a partner for me, like a lot of marriages were.
As she put it in a 2009 interview, “Norman and I had a deal. He wrote, and I did everything else.”
ON AUGUST 4, 1977, the family left for Maine. Norris had heard about the overhanging deck at the Thomas house, and the family lore about the twenty-foot plunge into Somes Sound. A few years before, Stephen had been the first one to take it, followed by Mailer, and the following summer, Michael. Norris took a look when she arrived at the Thomas house and, “pretending to be bolder and more athletic than I was,” jumped in. It was “terrifying,” she said, and not just because of the height. The water temperature is shockingly cold and takes one’s breath away. Remembering the moment many years later, Mailer said, “When I saw that long-legged creature jump in, I knew I’d have to go,” and “I dove in like a sack of potatoes.” Norris said she earned many brownie points that day. A week or so later, she told him she was pregnant. He was “thrilled,” she said.
Work on the Gilmore book went slowly. Plowing through a hundred-plus interviews containing “tons of scintillating details” was “a work of digestion, not erection,” he told Knox. As a break from his labors that summer, Mailer began work on a baseball betting scheme. “At some point,” Danielle recalled, “he said, ‘I think I have a foolproof method of guaranteeing a windfall. I think there’s a correlation between the performance of players and their biorhythms.’ ” The fundamental (and much derided) idea of biorhythms is that all humans experience high and low points of physical, emotional, and intellectual achievement, cycles that last from twenty-three to thirty-three days, pulsing up and down like a roller coaster. When the three cycles of a big league pitcher crest on the same day that he is on the mound, Mailer reasoned, an extraordinary performance is likely. Bet on the team that has the greatest number of players whose cycles are peaking. So he bought baseball magazines with birth dates, Danielle said. “We would sit with our little No. 2 pencils and we would mark down in columns these number
s. And then he would pull out his calculator and do this complicated calculation and come up with a prediction of who would win the game. I think he was paying us like $10 an hour—we made a lot of money. But he didn’t win much.” Nephew Peter Alson also remembered working on the project, and Stephen recalled that Mailer extended it to basketball and football. “He was a terrible gambler,” Peter said.
It was the engineer in him, he loved systems and he believed that there were ways to predict wins. I sort of loved that quality of his and got caught up in some of his more convoluted schemes. At his core, he had betting genes and he liked to gamble and devising a system gave him a rationale for doing so. The biggest flaw in his system was the calculator, which he found in a mail order catalogue. There might have been something to the theory of biorhythms, but we were using a device that was little more than a novelty item. It was the equivalent of using a toy telescope to practice astronomy.
In a 1989 interview, Mailer explained his error: “Finally, what came to me was the realization that these guys were not bound by the past. What makes a man a good professional is he can do his work on a bad day.” The scheme “was a joke.”
WORKING “LIKE A lawyer preparing briefs” through the early fall in Provincetown, Mailer accumulated over two thousand pages of notes on Schiller’s interviews. He also traveled again to Utah to do more interviews. On some of these trips, he and Schiller went again to Oregon to learn more about Gilmore’s time in prison there. Bessie Gilmore, Gary’s mother, lived in a trailer in Milwaukie, south of Portland, and he and Schiller knocked on her door several times, but she refused to let them in. “No, no, no, don’t bother me, you don’t need me,” she told them. The last time they tried, it was pouring rain, Schiller recalled.
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