Norris ended her account of these painful events in her memoir by discussing how Mailer had “analyzed violence, studied it his whole life, played with it in his imagination.” She puts his fascination with violence in the context of his writing, especially “The White Negro,” and also the stabbing of Adele. From the stories he told her, she concluded that the 1960 stabbing had been a crucible, and that “he had gone through the fire and come out cleaner and forged of greater steel.” She concluded, “Norman always had a huge ego; he believed he could change the course of a river by the strength of his personality.” He thought Abbott could do the same, failing to understand, as she observed, that not everyone was like him.
Mailer had pretty much been given a pass for “The Trouble”—the stabbing of Adele—although not by himself, nor by Adele, and he knew that there would be a never-ending cost to his children, especially Danielle and Betsy. But in their comments on the “Abbott business,” most reporters and editorial writers, pundits, and writers of letters to the editor, abetted by Mailer’s ill-considered and inflammatory statements about culture and risk, were righteous. Noting Mailer’s own earlier stabbing was de rigueur. The pieties of law and order were fingered like rosaries by op-ed writers, and Mailer was pilloried for romanticizing violence. The New Republic ran a color cover depicting him and Abbott sitting at a restaurant table on which lay a bloody knife and an open handcuff. On the wall, there is a portrait of the ex-con Jean Genet and his champion Jean-Paul Sartre. Inside the magazine, James Atlas called Abbott’s book “a hectic screed full of shrill political jargon,” adding that it was “irresponsible” of Mailer to say that Abbott could earn a living as a writer. Lewis Lapham, still at Harper’s after his colleagues had resigned en masse, stated in the Chicago Tribune that “Mailer now endorses sociopathic killers instead of prize fighters.” Lance Morrow of Time complained of the soft sentence Abbott had received and suggested that Abbott and Mailer “be shackled together with molybdenum chains.” In a front-page essay in the Times Book Review, Michiko Kakutani wrote a thoughtful, balanced piece that explored the Mailer-Abbott relationship. There was a myth at work, she wrote.
It was the myth, as Mailer puts it in his introduction, whereby “the boldness of the juvenile delinquent grows into the audacity of the self-made intellectual.” It was the wishful impulse to see Mr. Abbott’s life as a story not just of crime and punishment, but of crime and punishment and redemption; and it was the fervently held belief that talent somehow redeems, that art confers respectability, that the act of writing can somehow transform a violent man into a philosopher of violence.
Kakutani, who would later become Mailer’s critical bête noire, came closer than anyone else to articulating Mailer’s unspoken assumptions about Abbott. Mailer never stopped believing that art can ennoble, and that it is possible to rise above one’s errors and crimes, but the “Abbott business” challenged his deepest beliefs about human nature. It forced him to recognize the folly of believing that sinners and criminals could invariably be saved by art, could move forward into greater humanity rather than retreating into less.
The majority of those who attacked Mailer for his advocacy of Abbott made the assumption that his letter to the Utah Board of Pardons was the linchpin of his release. Mailer never disputed this, even when it was convincingly shown that his testimony was only one factor, and far from the most important, in the board’s decision. But even after friends pointed to his limited culpability, Mailer insisted it was greater. Malaquais, Torres, Lucid, and others all tried to convince him otherwise, to no avail. Appearing on the Dick Cavett show after Abbott’s conviction, he said, “I’m not trying to hide behind others. Or say that I wasn’t the only one who got him out. I certainly was one of the two or three people who were finally instrumental in getting him out.” Mailer’s idea of retributive balance, karmic debt, made him take more blame than he was due, according to his daughter Danielle. On some level he may have believed that he was atoning for his stabbing of Adele twenty-one years earlier. But it was only a down payment on that huge debt.
At a Fortune Society meeting shortly after Abbott’s conviction, William Styron stood up for Mailer, saying, “My heart goes out to him. I have an Abbott in my life.” Styron had aided a prisoner, Benjamin Reid, who later raped a woman while on parole. Styron repeated his defense of Mailer at a PEN conference, and in an essay, where he said, “Remembering one’s own Elysian childhood in juxtaposition with that of Reid and Abbott, I think it is fair to say that a concern for either of those wretched felons has less to do with romanticism than with a sense of justice, and the need for seeking restitution for other men’s lost childhoods.” Styron’s gesture led Mailer to write him a letter, his first to him since 1958. He wrote, “I just wanted to say that it was gracious of you and generous and kind of gutty to speak up for me the way you did about the Abbott business.” Mailer and Styron’s friendship was rekindled, perhaps the only happy outcome of their separate attempts to help “wretched felons.”
TWELVE
PHARAOHS AND TOUGH GUYS
“I had to go to Yugoslavia for some reason,” Schiller said, “but on the way to Yugoslavia, I stop to see Norman in London.” This was not happenstance. Schiller had purposely flown via London instead of Frankfurt so that he could see Mailer, who was there acting in Milos Forman’s Ragtime. Five months earlier, in July 1980, NBC had signed an agreement with Schiller to produce and direct a television miniseries based on The Executioner’s Song and had insisted that he sign Tracy Keenan Wynn to write the script. Wynn had many film and television credits, and a few years earlier had won an Emmy for his adaptation of Ernest Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. “Take your four million dollars,” the executives told Schiller, “and go make your film.” Schiller had a problem, however.
Mailer had been his first choice to write the screenplay, but both CBS and ABC, where Schiller had good relationships, didn’t want Mailer because he had never had a script produced. Schiller then went to movie studios, and they accepted Mailer as the first draft writer (mainly because all screenplays are rewritten), but they didn’t think Schiller had the requisite experience to direct a feature film. “I realized then that, you know, no way was this deal ever going to be made with both of us together,” Schiller said. Next, he tried NBC where the new president of the entertainment division, Brandon Tartikoff, was revamping programming and taking chances. He liked the proposed miniseries. Nick Nolte was the first choice to play Gilmore, and Priscilla Presley as Nicole; (ultimately the roles went to Tommy Lee Jones and Rosanna Arquette). Schiller called Mailer and told him that he was going with Wynn and NBC. “You’ve written the book and won your Pulitzer, and now it’s time for me to tell the story my way.” Mailer didn’t argue, Schiller said.
At lunch with Mailer and Norris in London in December, Schiller knew Mailer would ask about Wynn’s script. Schiller said that it was a fine adaptation, but not exciting. Not much else was said, and Schiller left for Yugoslavia. In February 1981, Schiller received a script in the mail from Mailer, written on spec. Schiller liked it enough to send it to NBC. It seemed nearly the same as Wynn’s, but there were subtle changes, lines shuffled or dropped, and some additions. Schiller explained.
With every single character in Mailer’s version, the dialogue defines the character. I just couldn’t believe it. “I don’t give a shit about your pants”—that line defines Brenda right off the bat. In Mailer’s scene that was the first line. Tracy used the same thing, but it was the third line in his scene. By the time you got to that line, its power was dissipated.
NBC also liked the script. “It was just different,” an NBC vice president stated. “It had a different tone.” Schiller had already paid Wynn, and when NBC accepted Mailer’s version, he had to pay Mailer $250,000.
The question of who should get the screen credit was contested and went to the Writers Guild for arbitration. Mailer had not read Wynn’s script, and wrote a brief letter to the guild that attempte
d to prove it. His argument was that anyone who wrote a script based on the book would have to depict the same key events and characters. He explained it this way.
If two people are driving from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco following the coastal road, they’re likely to stop at the same roadhouses en route, they’re likely to sleep at the same inns and so forth and so forth and so forth. And that book had a clearly marked line of narrative, if ever a book did and, therefore, if you’re going to do a script with it, you’d be following the book. So we each were following the book very closely. The difference was that I felt that I knew the book in a way that no one else did.
The guild’s judgment was based on reading the two scripts with the writers’ names coded, Writer A and Writer B. Besides the subtleties of characterization, Mailer’s script also contained, according to Schiller, new scenes drawn from the original interviews and research, material not used in the book. His familiarity with this material was an obvious advantage, and the guild awarded him sole screenplay credit. Wynn accepted the ruling. Mailer, rankled by the rejection of his screenplay by Sergio Leone five years earlier, felt vindicated.
He was also working intermittently on Strawhead, his play about Marilyn Monroe. Ancient Evenings was still a long way from completion, but first he had to finish work on his new collection, divided into a dozen essays and prefaces (Pieces) and twenty interviews (Pontifications). His reflections on television, “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy,” his comic memoir of The Harvard Advocate, “Our Man at Harvard,” and his essay on Watergate, “A Harlot High and Low,” were the key writings. The interview section included a 1975 interview with Laura Adams on reincarnation and magic. This interview, one of Mailer’s most important, contains a long discussion of his belief in magic, something he was exploring in Ancient Evenings. The four-hundred-page collection, which he dedicated to his sister, appeared on June 21, 1982, not long after Abbott was sentenced. The timing did not help the book’s reception, which was quiet and mixed.
Pieces and Pontifications, Mailer’s fifth miscellany, is a product of the 1970s, when he “was much out of step.” Besides dropping the third person personal and shifting focus away from himself, he had withdrawn from politics to a great extent after the 1972 election. Lucid put his finger on Mailer’s malaise in the decade: he spent his first twenty years as a writer “envisioning and anticipating moments of climactic crisis,” in his personal life, in politics and culture, and sometimes all three, overlapping. “But always the crisis was about to happen. Always our situation was before. The 1970s represented after. The counter-culture was over. The war in Vietnam was over.” One world was dying and a new one had not yet been born.
He ends his review by noting that The Executioner’s Song was “the first child” of the new time, the first reimagining. While the film version (broadcast in November 1982) did not enjoy the huge popularity of the book, it was deemed a success by the critics and the television audience, garnering the highest rating for an NBC program in fifteen months. It was nominated for five Emmys, including one for Mailer’s adaptation. It won two, one for sound production and one for Tommy Lee Jones as best actor. The film led to a directorial career for Schiller and was a breakthrough for Jones. Mailer’s achievement whetted his desire to write more screenplays and to try his hand again as director.
THROUGH ALL THIS period, from the publication of Executioner’s Song, through his divorces and marriage to Norris, Abbott’s release and Adan’s death, work on Strawhead, Pieces and Pontifications, and the teleplay of Song, Mailer had slighted his patient literary spouse, the Egyptian novel, working on it only sporadically. But in the summer of 1982, Little, Brown was pressing him. As he wrote to a writer friend, the prospect of trying to write several hundred more pages of Ancient Evenings in a short period was “a perfect expression of my character: work ten years with great care on something, and then arrange matters so that I have to sprint at the end.” He worked all summer in Provincetown and Maine. Barbara and Al visited, and Susan came with his first grandchild, Valentina. Unlike previous summers, several of the children were either traveling or working and the house was not always full. In the fall he finally finished the novel, completing the last revision of the galleys in early December. He announced the end in a long letter to his old friend Richard Stratton. “I really need another year to get this behemoth into classic shape for the ages,” he said, but further delay was out of the question. He felt he had realized his goal of re-creating for the reader
some possible Egyptian society, full of its pagan, sacramental sophistication, a world without Moses or Jesus, but stacked with acquisitive and elegant society—quite a trick, I tell you—for eleven years I’ve been fumbling around in it, but now, going over it for this last time, I begin to recognize how much of me is in it and in ways too deep for even me to understand. My sister after reading it laughed and said, “You know, in a funny way, this is the best argument for karma I’ve ever come across.” How could [you] ever know all this stuff if you didn’t live then was what she said finally by implication.
Little, Brown set publication for April 4, 1983, to be followed by the novel’s appearance in England in late May.
Mailer’s letter to Stratton reached him in Portland, Maine, where he was awaiting trial on charges of drug smuggling. A raid by an American-Canadian drug enforcement team in March 1982, “Operation Rose,” led to the arrest of Stratton and fourteen others in Maine, Quebec, and Toronto. The drugs, smuggled in from Beirut, had a street value of $30 million, and Canadian authorities said the thirty-six-year-old Stratton was the boss of “the largest hashish and marijuana smuggling ring ever to be broken” in that country. Stratton denied the charges, stating that he was researching a book about the international drug trade. The end point for the drugs—2,500 pounds were seized—was Robert Rowbotham, a friend of Stratton’s whom Mailer had testified for at an earlier drug trial in Toronto. (Rowbotham was running his drug operation from prison). Stratton admitted receiving approximately $200,000 from Rowbotham, which he said was payment for a biography of the marijuana guru, nicknamed “Rosie.”
A few days after telling Stratton that he would be a character witness for him at his upcoming trial, Mailer got a call from Buzz Farbar, who had been working as a money courier for Stratton, to set up a lunch date. On December 9, Mailer met him at a Brooklyn restaurant, Armando’s, on Montague Street. He had no way of knowing that three weeks earlier Farbar had been arrested at gunpoint for paying $24,000 for a kilo of what he thought was cocaine from an undercover DEA agent, Martin McGuire. Within ten minutes of his arrest at his New York apartment, McGuire said to him, “We know your friend Mailer is involved.” The feds had “a serious hard-on” for Mailer, Stratton said. “After Mailer had testified at the Rowbotham trial, up in Canada,” Stratton recalled, “they broke into Norman’s place in Brooklyn and rifled through his stuff, found a couple of ounces of pot, and left it right in the middle of the bed as a kind of sign or warning. We’re watching you, Mailer.”
It was Farbar who, unwittingly, had made Mailer a DEA target. In 1981, he had organized a dinner party for “my heavy connections in Beirut,” as Stratton described them, and the Mailers. “Buzz was showing off,” Stratton said. As Stratton was to learn, the Lebanese were cooperating with American authorities, and his arrest, and later Farbar’s, resulted from information they had provided. The DEA busted Farbar, but they wanted Mailer, Stratton said.
It was a time when John DeLorean had been set up in that sting operation in Los Angeles. John Lennon had been busted. They were making drug cases against famous people to discredit them. It was propaganda in the war on drugs. They figured that Mailer’s scalp would’ve been great to have on somebody’s belt. He was already a government target for a lot of other reasons, because he was so vocally critical of the government. And people listened to Norman, particularly a generation of young people who were already fed up with the lies our government was telling us about Vietnam, pot, and what have you.
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br /> The DEA had given Farbar a lie detector test and asked him if Mailer had invested in the hashish deal. He denied it. “We know you’ve been lying,” he was told. “You have a family on the one hand, and Mailer on the other. One will have to go.” Knowing that Mailer was innocent, Farbar agreed to wear a recorder at his lunch with him. As instructed, Farbar brought up Stratton’s hashish smuggling. Mailer indicated that he didn’t want to talk about it. Farbar persisted and an irritated Mailer told him to stop. “I’m possibly going to be testifying at Richard’s trial as a character witness, and I certainly don’t want to get into a situation where I’m going to be in jeopardy of perjury.” He went on to say that Stratton was a great friend, but he didn’t know much about his background; he knew him as a writer. Farbar kept pressing. “I’ve never had anything to do with the drug business,” Mailer said. “I don’t want to hear nothing about Richard, all right?” Farbar said that he had brought up the subject out of concern for Mailer. “I’ll worry about my own ass in my own way,” Mailer replied. When the DEA agents heard the recording, they said the conversation appeared to have been rehearsed, and Farbar was convicted and sentenced to six years for hashish smuggling, a harsh sentence for a first offender.
Dick and Doris Kearns Goodwin were old friends of Stratton’s, and they attended his trial. She and Mailer testified to his literary abilities. But he was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison. Stratton was on his way to the penitentiary, ready to do his time. But the federal drug prosecutors hadn’t given up on nailing Mailer. They pulled Stratton off the bus in New York and told him they were going to try him under the continuing criminal enterprise, or “Kingpin,” statute. He met the prosecutor, who, according to Stratton, said in effect, Give us Mailer, and you’ll walk. They were also interested in Hunter Thompson, a noted drug user, and a few other high-profile figures. “I refused to cooperate with the government. I figured, I did this, let me pay for it.” Mailer was not permitted by Judge Constance Baker Motley to testify at Stratton’s trial. She sentenced Stratton to an additional ten years with no possibility of parole, basing this extraordinarily long sentence on his refusal to cooperate. Stratton later wrote his own appeal, which argued that individuals can only be sentenced for their crimes, not for refusing to implicate others. The courts agreed with his appeal, and he was released after eight years. Farbar got out after forty-six months.
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