THE ONLY THING he published in 1978 was a preface to his 1944 novel, A Transit to Narcissus, brought out in a limited facsimile edition by his friend Howard Fertig. He accepted few speaking engagements, and none at colleges save a brief talk at his thirty-fifth Harvard reunion, where he was introduced as “the folk hero of our class and nation.” In February, he attended a huge party in New York with friends and admirers of James Jones, who had died of congestive heart disease the previous May. The party celebrated the posthumous publication of the concluding novel of Jones’s World War II trilogy, Whistle, published by Doubleday, where Gloria Jones was an editor. Jacqueline Onassis, also a Doubleday editor, attended the party and was quoted as saying that Whistle was her favorite novel by Jones. Mailer, wearing his (now tight-fitting) Angelo Litrico velvet suit, was photographed countless times during his conversation with Mrs. Onassis. Norris, who accompanied him, told reporters that she would give birth to their child in April, via natural childbirth, “and Norman plans to be in the delivery room.”
Mailer had seen Gloria Jones only a few times since the late 1950s, and until that night had never met Jones’s daughter, Kaylie, who would become a novelist after college. Kaylie does not mention the book party in Lies My Mother Never Told Me, her graceful and frank memoir of her struggle to give up alcohol and become a writer, but provides an account of another meeting with Mailer in 1989. It took place at the apartment of Jean Stein, editor of the literary journal Grand Street, who was a good friend of Mailer’s. “He turned to me,” she wrote, “and said simply, ‘I loved your father. He was the best friend I ever had, and I’ve missed him every day of my life. Losing him was one of the worst things that ever happened to me.’ ” Kaylie was taken aback: “This was the tough-talking, wheedling, arrogant son of a bitch my father was so angry at all through my childhood?” Mailer went on to say that he deeply regretted his last conversation with Jones, which had taken place in Elaine’s a few months before Jones died. Jones was sitting alone at the bar when Mailer walked in and said to him, half seriously, “Let’s settle this thing once and for all, Jim. Let’s go outside and fight it out,” which was his time-tested way of cementing a friendship, win or lose. But Jones was not up to it. “I can’t Norman, I’m sick. I’ve got a bum heart.” Mailer described to Kaylie the way Jones said it: “There was no bravado, no self-pity, no anger in his words. Just a fact, and the total exhaustion in his eyes.” Mailer felt bad, and regretted his challenge. To the end of his life, he remembered this final meeting, and repeated to others that his friendship with Jones was the most intense of his life. Mailer told Kaylie that he would like to help her if he could. Gloria immediately proposed that he give a blurb to Kaylie’s forthcoming novel about Russia, Quite the Other Way, and offered to give him a blowjob for his endorsement. Norris, who was listening to the conversation, burst out laughing, as did everyone else at the party. Kaylie got the blurb, gratis. Mailer knew he owed something to the memory of the man he said later had “the wisdom of an elegant redneck.”
IN MID-FEBRUARY 1978, Mailer received a letter from a convict named Jack Abbott, who would play a small role in the composition of The Executioner’s Song. Abbott was in the same prison that Gilmore was paroled from in 1976, the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, built to replace Alcatraz. Abbott had read that Mailer was working on a book about Gary Gilmore, and offered to tell him what life was like in maximum security prisons. Like Gilmore, he had also done time in the Utah State Prison (and held the distinction of being the only person to escape from it) and, through the convict grapevine, had learned a few things about Gilmore. Mailer wrote back to thank him for his insights into “the psychology of violence inculcated in one after fifteen years in jail that is not easily communicable and not necessarily obliging to the works of the imagination.” He asked Abbott to tell him stories of prison life, and Abbott did. None of Mailer’s many correspondents mailed him more words than did Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted forger, bank robber, and murderer, serving an intermediate term of up to nineteen years for his crimes. Over the next three years, Abbott wrote Mailer over two thousand pages.
His first letter “was intense, direct, unadorned, and detached.” His voice was unique, Mailer said, and he had “an eye for the continuation of his thought that was like the line a racing-car driver takes around a turn.” He was also “an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge.”
So he has a mind like no other I have encountered. It speaks from the nineteenth century as clearly as from the twentieth. There are moments when the voice that enters your mind is the clear descendant of Marx and Lenin untouched by any intervention of history. Indeed, Abbott, who is half Irish and half Chinese, even bears a small but definite resemblance to Lenin, and the tone of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov rises out of some of these pages. . . . Freedom and justice are oxygen to Abbott.
These words came three years later as part of Mailer’s introduction to Abbott’s prison letters, which he helped to have published. During their early correspondence, however, Mailer was too preoccupied with Gilmore to see Abbott as more than just a fairly interesting informant.
From January to early May, he worked almost every day in the office on the floor below his apartment. Mounds of transcripts and notes took up most of the floor space in the eight-by-twelve room with a single window overlooking the Brooklyn Heights promenade, the East River, and lower Manhattan. Trucks on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway under the Promenade rattled the windows day and night. The radiator hissed and clanked. The confined space reminded him of a prison cell, he said, and over the months of ten- and twelve-hour days he came to understand Gilmore “as well as I know some of my ex-wives.” When he came up for air to write some letters on May 10, he had six hundred pages of typescript. One letter was to Abbott, who was the first correspondent to learn that Norris had given birth to a son on April 16. “We’re calling him John Buffalo—don’t ask me why, I just like the name,” he wrote.
In a letter to Uncle Louis and Aunt Moos, Mailer wrote that the book would have “as many characters and situations and clarity of purpose, I hope, as ‘The Naked and the Dead.’ ” What he was aiming for, he went on, was the deep psychology of the murderer, “which has never been touched by anyone, except for that author sitting next to God himself, old Dostoyevsky.” This letter, and several others written that day, show that Mailer had now firmly decided on most of the narrative key episodes, selected his post of observation, found his voice, and chosen a title. But knowing the full story, he said later, was “a hazard.” When writing novels, he didn’t want to know how things were going to turn out, preferring to learn as he proceeded. He wanted The Executioner’s Song to read the same way, and was purposely inattentive to anything but that portion of the story under construction. Being overly conversant with its future events, he said later, “would make me curve what was happening to my characters at the place where I had them.” Having made the key decisions, he was now ready to pick up the pace, and not merely because of his confirmed sense of direction; he needed a new infusion of cash. He planned to work double shifts for the next three months in order to have a 1,200-page manuscript by August 1. He told Morton Yanow, a California writer with whom he had struck up a correspondence, that Song would be “not unlike ‘In Cold Blood’ except, of course, vastly different in tone but the same essential technique,” that is, nothing would be imagined, but it “reads in the form of a novel.” He hoped that the similarities ended there because it would be “tedious” if his book was compared to Capote’s in every review.
Mailer stayed in New York in June and July and worked. To help their financial situation Norris was doing portraits on commission and also teaching art classes at St. Ann’s School, where Matthew attended. On weekends some of the other children visited. Mailer told Louis and Moos that it is “truly a menagerie come Saturday and Sunday—the great irony is that I was never cut out for fatherhood at all.”
Norris handled whatever came up with the children and was “a splendid mother,” he said. She also read the manuscript as it was typed by one of a half dozen typists, including Martha Thomases, who became a valued helper and good friend. Judith McNally was also proving to be a fine assistant. She did research for the book while handling Mailer’s literary affairs and correspondence, and like his other secretaries pitched in to help with household chores. Within a year or two, she would sign his name to letters, although she never achieved a good facsimile of his inelegant, but serviceable handwriting.
Another assistant was Jere Herzenberg, who came to work for him at about the same time as Judith McNally. A musicologist working on a graduate degree, she told Mailer biographer Carl Rollyson, “he dictated just about everything into a tape recorder to get the accent and the rhythm down. I would go over the transcriptions of the tape checking for grammar and punctuation, and then he would edit the transcripts.” He wanted everything to be scrupulously documented, and he also wanted to capture, as far as possible, the idiolects of his huge cast of characters. As Herzenberg put it, Mailer wanted the book to be “in the voice of the people of Utah.”
Before he left for Maine he wrote again to Yanow about his progress. “The manuscript will probably go on to 1400 or 1500 pages,” he said. Looking ahead to the publicity he would be doing for the book, he said, “God, will I get tired of the question, ‘Why did you spend so much time and space on such a man?’ ” This prediction was accurate; it was often the first question he was asked. To Abbott, who was deluging him with descriptions of prison life, he revealed that he would run out of money by the end of September, but did not feel sorry for himself because it was a situation “entirely of my own making as I was warned often enough en route as I kept getting married and divorced.” He said he needed a minimum of $250,000 a year to support his establishment. “I thought I’d be able to do the book on Gilmore in six months and gain a half year on myself.” Now he predicted that it would take him until January 1979 to complete it.
Mailer took off three weeks in August and then returned to work. He wrote no letters and did little else except write the book. In Maine, he jogged three times a week, but back in Brooklyn he got little exercise—he sparred with Torres, his son Michael, and other friends once a week—and his weight blew up to two hundred. He had learned over the years that it was impossible to write and keep in shape at the same time. He summed up his situation in a letter to a writer friend, Mary Breasted:
I work six or seven days a week don’t go out, and curse my primal verbosity of mind. The worst of it is that all the people who like my other books will probably not like this one. It’s not searching, but panoramic and descriptive, almost pedestrian. The materials are so godawful strong I didn’t know any other way to do it. Just put it there and take people through the waxworks. It’s incredible stuff, really.
He continued working through the fall, and on December 6 delivered a rough draft of 1,969 double-spaced pages, as he announced to Gilmore’s cousin Brenda, whom he counted on to spread the word to her family.
NORRIS HAD GOTTEN pregnant with John Buffalo in the summer of 1977 when she and Mailer were living in Provincetown. Mailer, Norris, and the children drove to Hartford one night to see Beverly perform. Norris was getting along fairly well with her at the time, but after her pregnancy was revealed, things changed. Toward the end of the year, he called Beverly in Provincetown and asked her to come to Brooklyn for a talk. He had been putting off asking for a divorce, but with a second child to be born out of wedlock, and obvious pressure from Norris, he was ready. Norris states in her memoir that “Beverly totally flipped out” when she was told of the pregnancy. Mailer was leaning in the window of her car on the street outside 142 Columbia Heights when she floored the gas pedal. “He said he’d pulled his head out of the car just in time to keep from being decapitated.” Beverly sued for divorce in Massachusetts in October 1978; as Norris wrote, “that started a legal battle that lasted for nearly three years.”
Money was the chief contention at the trial. Both pointed to fights, lapses, indignities, and infidelities, but Beverly stated publicly that Mailer was a good father, and the boys moved back and forth between the parents, eventually dividing their time between the two when they were teenagers. Mailer had been giving her $400 a month and paying the mortgage and taxes on their Provincetown house, but Beverly planned to move to New York to renew her acting career and wanted more support. She argued that she had supported his career for six years, 1963 to 1969, during which time he had published eight major books (four of them dedicated to her), and won several major awards. Now it was her turn. She asked for $1,000 a week, child support, the house in Provincetown (valued at $135,000), and $10,000 a year for a New York apartment. “Listen,” she told People, “he said he was broke when I met him, and it’s the same story now. Norman is a corporation. He’s screaming poverty, but he makes $347,000 a year.” His response was that she was asking for $120,000 in annual pretax dollars, an impossible sum, as he currently owed a total of $400,000 to Scott Meredith, his mother, and the IRS, and was making regular payments to Adele, Jeanne Campbell, and Carol Stevens, whom he called “my fifth wife.” When asked by Beverly’s lawyer if he was feeling “a sense of obligation” toward Stevens, he said, “If feelings of loyalty and tenderness are obligation, then I felt an obligation,” adding, “She is a fine, unselfish woman . . . an artist in her field,” who “is not built for rough living.” He was at a loss trying to explain how various advances had been spent, or what he had done with the money from the sale of his Village Voice stock. “His affairs are a holy mess,” Mailer’s lawyer, Monroe Inker, told the judge. Mailer added, “My talent is making money, not managing it.”
The trial, a miserable affair, went on for months. Unpleasant details of the marriage were reported in the Boston Herald and other papers. Perhaps the only moment of humor came when Mailer told the Herald that his fourth wife was a talented actress. “In fact,” he said, “after she testified in the divorce case I went up and spoke to her for the first time in a year. I said, ‘I want to congratulate you on a fine performance. Of course, you could use somebody to write your dialogue.’ ” The divorce was granted on March 21, 1980, under existing Massachusetts law as a decree nisi, a provisional judgment. A six-month waiting period was required.
Judge Shirley R. Lewis granted Beverly a lump sum of $7,500 from the pending sale of a farm in Philips, Maine, that Mailer owned with Dick Goodwin, and awarded her $575 a week in alimony for seven years, plus $200 a week in child support. He was also required to pay their tuition at the private schools they were attending and for four years of college, and to keep up health care benefits for all three. Finally, he was required to pay the premium on a $50,000 life insurance policy on his life. But the waterfront house in Provincetown, which contained so many memories for the Mailers, was lost. Despite various attempts to save it, it was sold by the IRS for $65,000. After a long legal struggle, Beverly was evicted.
A month after Judge Lewis’s decree, Beverly decided to contest the divorce. Her lawyer said she was unhappy with the settlement terms and wanted to relitigate the matter in a New York court. Judge Lewis rejected her appeal on September 25, and Inker told Mailer he was free to marry. His plan was to marry Carol, divorce her posthaste, and marry Norris. When Norris saw him leave on the evening of November 7 for the ceremony with Carol, she put on a “brave face,” but knew “he was on his way to marry a woman he still had feeling for. (He would always have feeling for her. It was something I lived with, like arthritis).” He married Carol in the chambers of Judge Shirley Fingerhood, a friend of his sister’s. As Norris noted, “They had written down their vows, which were on the order of, ‘I want to honor the years we have spent together and the love that created this beautiful child, Maggie.’ ” She lay awake that night wondering if Carol would decide to remain married “and let me stew, as she had stewed for ten plus years while he was married to Beverly.” Her fears were for n
aught; Carol signed the papers. The next day Mailer flew to Haiti for a weekend divorce. On the morning of his second marriage in four days, November 11, 1980, he was distraught when he awoke. He said, “All my life, all I have ever wanted was to be free and alone in Paris.” Norris said to him:
Look, sweetie. What would happen if you were free and alone in Paris? You’d be walking down one of the boulevards and you’d sit at a sidewalk café to have a cup of espresso. A pretty girl would walk by and you would give her one of your twenty-five cent smiles. She would smile back and stop to talk. You would invite her to sit and buy her a cup of coffee. You’d go to a museum, and then take her out to dinner. Soon she would be living with you, and then she would get pregnant, and you wouldn’t be free and alone in Paris anymore, would you?
Mailer laughed, and as John Buffalo jumped into their bed, he said, “Okay. Let’s go get married and legitimize this little bugger.”
Calls were made to friends for the ceremony that afternoon. Pat Kennedy Lawford came with a case of champagne, and the maid of honor, Norris’s friend, Jan Cushing Olympitis, brought a wedding cake. Mayor Ed Koch attended with his deputy Dan Wolf (Mailer’s old friend), as did future mayor David Dinkins, who was the city clerk at the time and had signed their marriage license. Susan, Michael, and Maggie couldn’t make it, but Matt and John Buffalo, Betsy, Danielle, and Kate were there, as was Stephen, the best man. Rabbi David Glazer performed the ceremony. A few others attended: Barbara and Al, Fan, Dotson Rader, José and Ramona Torres, Jean Stein, and the Goodwins (who drove down from Massachusetts) among them. Mailer’s boxing friend, Jeffrey Michelson, said that Mailer said his vows “with great theatrical diction and when he gets to the part about ‘fidelity,’ he drops half an octave lower, drawls the word with precision and looks Norris in the eye with conviction bordering on a glare. Not a threatening glare, but a drop-dead serious, I-swear-to-God, strike-me-dead glare.” Norris’s parents couldn’t attend but were very happy that their daughter was legally wed. “I was no longer the tootsie; I was the wife,” she recalled.
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