Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  A few months later, Little, Brown told Mailer that they were not happy with the manuscript of Tough Guys. Meredith put a good face on it by issuing a statement: “We told Little, Brown we would count it a great courtesy if they would release the book so that it could be published with great fanfare instead of a swan song.” Mailer said later, “I was shocked that they didn’t like it,” and surprised that they did not recognize its sales potential. Random House agreed to make the four-book deal a five-book deal, and the shift of publishers was complete. His new publisher advertised the book extensively, and published a first edition of 150,000 copies. The paperback edition went through at least fifteen printings.

  Loyal to his clients, Meredith lent them money (at 8 percent) when they were in need. According to Jack Scovil, who worked for Meredith for decades, Mailer borrowed regularly and ran up large balances. “If you knew Scott,” Scovil recalled, “and his love of money, and his hatred of letting any dime slip past his grasp, the fact that he had lent somebody $120,000, even Norman Mailer, I’m sure gave him many sleepless nights. But it all came back eventually.” The two men were unfailingly loyal to each other. “They admired and respected each other,” Scovil said, “and their intellectual talents. Scott was not an educated man. But nevertheless he was a very bright man, and one could even say brilliant in many aspects of his life. And he could parley with Norman quite well.” Mailer said Meredith had “a supple brain.”

  At the time the Meredith agency had an impressive client list: P. G. Wodehouse, Margaret Truman, Garry Wills, Mickey Spillane, Spiro Agnew, Carl Sagan, and JFK’s mistress Judith Campbell Exner (she received an $800,000 advance), to name a few. Mailer, Scovil explained, “was the prime client of the agency. There’s no question about that, no question in Scott’s mind. Norman was the number one client for, I think, both personal reasons but also for very pragmatic reasons as well. He was a name figure. He drew all kinds of people to the agency, simply by being there.” The relationship had begun in 1963, when Mailer called Meredith on the phone.

  “I hear you’re the guy who gets the money,” said Mailer.

  “That’s what I hear too,” said Meredith.

  “Well, I need money,” Mailer replied.

  Meredith negotiated the lucrative deal for An American Dream, got Mailer out of a financial hole, and became his agent for the next thirty years. “Before Norman, Scott was a scruffy kind of agent,” Scovil said, who “was looked down on by the literary establishment.” After Mailer came aboard, Meredith picked up many major clients. Mailer “legitimized the agency in the eyes of the outside world,” Scovil said, although he was never the agency’s biggest moneymaker.

  Part salesman, part banker and part counselor, Meredith bailed them out of jail and listened to their marital problems, but he did not spend much time reading their work. He left that to his able associates, Scovil and Russell Galen, who, after Meredith’s death in 1993, started their own agency. They wrote detailed reports for Scott’s meetings with Mailer. “To the best of my knowledge,” Scovil said,

  Scott Meredith never read a word that Norman wrote. And I don’t think Norman ever knew that, of course. The reason for the reports was to enable Scott to have his meeting, his dinner, there were always “dinner meetings” after a manuscript was delivered. I don’t think Norman was actually expecting any criticism in the sense of “should I change this,” or “should I change that,” I don’t think there was any question of that. But he did want to know what Scott’s reaction was and Scott’s reaction was based on how we were telling him to react. For the most part, if I remember correctly, the reports were quite lavish and laudatory.

  Various people complained to Mailer about Meredith over the years, but their strong bond persisted. Tough Guys Don’t Dance is dedicated to him.

  Reviews of the novel were somewhat better than for Ancient Evenings, and it reached number four on the bestseller list, his third book in five years to make it. Singled out for praise in even some of the unfavorable reviews was Madden’s father, Dougy, another in the long line of male mentor figures in Mailer’s fiction. Madden senior arrives in Provincetown the morning after his son has retrieved the heads from the Truro burrow. In his prime, a large, strong man (six foot three, 280 pounds), he is now weak from chemotherapy and, disgusted with the nausea that accompanies the treatment, has decided to give it up. Bourbon is his new medicine. Tim Madden is half Irish, one quarter Jewish, and one quarter Protestant, a “sensitive Irishman.” But his father is a “pure ethnic,” Mailer said, “I wanted him to be a real Irishman marked by that special kind of probity that they can possess, along with powerful, murderous emotions.”

  During another gray P-town day, father and son pass the bottle and discuss cancer, courage, and the disposal of body parts. Statistics, Dougy says, indicate that people in mental institutions get cancer at a much lower rate than the general population. “I figure it this way,” he says, passing on one of Mailer’s favorite dualisms, “cancer is the cure for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is the cure for cancer.” But he discovers another cure: dirty jobs. The more horrible, the better. Dougy secures baling wire to an anchor, ties it to spikes he has driven through the eye sockets of the two heads he retrieved from the woods, and plummets them some fathoms down. Later, he gives sea burials to the bodies of the two women, as well as others, among them Regency, who is killed after he has a mental breakdown and a stroke. “Crazy people in serious places had to be executed,” Madden says. A short time later, Dougy reaps the homeopathic benefit of his grisly work when his cancer goes into remission. “Maybe I was in the wrong occupation all this time,” he tells his son.

  The mayhem is hugger-mugger, very much as in Jacobean revenge tragedy, and motives are moot. Greed, blood, and terror engulf everyone, save the Maddens. Everyone is guilty to some degree. The last chapter of the novel tries and fails to explain how so many people could have disappeared without repercussions of any sort. What makes Tough Guys Don’t Dance worth reading is not the tangled plot nor the missing links between motivation and deed, but Mailer’s horrid crew of miscreants, who are as lovingly and convincingly drawn as any in his novels. The other quality that lifts the novel above its flaws is the tense, melancholy mood created by Tim Madden. The objective correlative for the damp, drizzly November in his soul is the half-deserted, haunted town at the edge of America, the place Mailer loved more than any other.

  ABOUT SIX WEEKS before his concentrated effort on Tough Guys, Mailer completed an adaptation of Henry Miller’s trilogy Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, known as The Rosy Crucifixion. The opportunity to write his third screenplay came from a young editor at The Village Voice, Rudy Langlais. He wanted to use Miller’s masterwork as the basis for “the first classy X-rated Hollywood film.” After he read Genius and Lust, he knew that Mailer was the screenwriter he wanted. Langlais pitched Mailer the story of Miller’s profound love for his second wife, June Edith Smith (Mona in the novel), and her affair with Anastasia, who lived with them for a time: “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl to girl, boy gets girl back.” Mailer was enthusiastic and went to work. Langlais, a novice in the film world, began the search for funding, and eventually gained the support of the head of Twentieth Century-Fox films, Joe Wizan. Mailer was paid $250,000.

  After he finished the screenplay, he sent it to Langlais, who found that Mailer had followed the story line they had agreed on, but had added a framing character: “Old Henry,” Miller as an eighty-year-old codger, who breaks into the action to make observations about himself as a younger man, played by a second actor. Mailer’s desire for narrative provenance was again in play. Langlais felt that “Old Henry” was unnecessary, and with some trepidation began a cut-and-paste operation. He took the edited version to Mailer’s Brooklyn apartment when he was done, but Mailer didn’t want to read it. He wanted to drink, and they proceeded to put away several bottles of Frenesi, the white wine Mailer was currently favoring, as they discussed the affairs of the universe. Langlais left as the sun was coming up. La
ter that day, Mailer called him up, and said: “How dare you, how dare you . . . be right!”

  Before this occurred, however, the studio executives insisted that Mailer come to Los Angeles to close the deal. Langlais picked him up at the airport, and while driving him to the hotel told him how much he had enjoyed The Fight, especially the description of Mailer climbing from one seventh floor balcony to another at his hotel in Kinshasa. When they walked into Mailer’s room on the fifteenth floor of the Century Plaza Hotel, a stunned Langlais watched as he climbed to the railing of the balcony, and said, “I know what you’re thinking: ‘There goes my movie deal.’ ” Relief and laughter followed when Mailer climbed down.

  The next day—April Fool’s Day 1983—they met with Wizan and a squadron of VPs eager to meet Mailer, who came in feinting and jabbing. The executives were pleased. As they were leaving, one of them said he was so happy that a film would be made about Arthur Miller and his wife, Marilyn Monroe. Henry Miller was unknown to them, and they obviously had not read The Rosy Crucifixion. Like so many film projects, it slowly collapsed over the next year. It remains on the shelf at the studio. Langlais remained a good friend and later brokered another screenplay deal for him with Universal Studios—“Havana,” the story of Meyer Lansky running racetracks and casinos for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1940s and 1950s. It also remains unproduced.

  MAILER OFTEN SENT the manuscripts of friends to Meredith. He also used him to funnel money to people. Sometime in the mid-1980s, Mailer asked him to send money to a new mistress, Carole Mallory, a former cover model for major magazines like New York and Cosmopolitan who also had small roles in a few films in the 1970s, including Take This Job and Shove It. A large poster (which she gave Mailer) for this film, depicting a curvaceous Mallory in a bikini bottom and torn, scanty T-shirt, rivaled sales of Farrah Fawcett’s famous swimsuit poster. Jack Scovil, who handled the transfer of funds, said that he was “surprised that Norman would get involved with someone like that,” referring to Mallory’s reputation as a star seducer. In several interviews, numerous gossip column snippets, and a 2009 memoir, Mallory lists the men that she had “picked up,” including Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Richard Gere, Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Peter Sellers—she said Brits were “more fun than the Americans”—and Dodi Fayed, the Egyptian playboy who died in the car crash with Princess Diana. Plus a few rock stars. She was also engaged to Picasso’s son Claude during the 1970s—he jilted her—and claims to have turned down propositions from Albert Finney and Jack Nicholson.

  Buzz Farbar had introduced Mallory to Mailer at Elaine’s. A few weeks later, in January 1984, she read that he would be speaking at a showing of his films at the Thalia Theater in Manhattan. When the event was over, she slipped him a note asking to meet the following day at a coffee shop. She wanted to get his opinion of a memoir of her years with Claude Picasso. They met, he read some of the manuscript—a chapter describing her night with Beatty—and she left some lipstick on his face as well as her telephone number in Los Angeles. That summer, when he was in Los Angeles doing publicity for Tough Guys Don’t Dance, they had their first tryst at the Bel Air Hotel. Soon, she was seeing him when he was in L.A. and was in love. She loved his fame, his wit, his sexual equipment, his detailed writing advice. “I longed for an affair with a genius,” she said. During their time together, she said, “I noticed that he used words like oxymoron, swath, and sententious. Hearing him speak was an education.” She also loved the money he gave her. But at one point, her $200-a-week stipend ceased, as Scovil recalled.

  Scott would never authorize giving Carole money unless Norman had authorized it. And there was a point where Norman wanted to cut her off and Carole had come up to the office and caused a great scene. She was crying and she was screaming and she was doing all kinds of things, saying all kinds of things, and that she deserved the money.

  Another way of helping Mallory financially was to give her interviews, which he did on several occasions. Through him, she also met other writers and celebrities. Joseph Heller, Erica Jong, Isabella Rossellini, and Kurt Vonnegut are some of the interviewees she mentions in her memoir. One of her interviews with Mailer included Vidal, and was the cover feature in the May 1991 Esquire (he and Mailer had made up by this time), but Mailer said it was a weak piece, even after he had tweaked it. He edited her interviews with him before they were published, with the exception of the last two, which she refused, in the name of honesty, she said, to let him review or change. Mallory was unaware that some famous people insisted on the right to do this. She believed that it was “his way of hiding the truth.” By revising his comments, she said, “he controlled his image for history.” Norris eventually learned about Mallory, who was not timid about showing up at Mailer events, but the affair was fairly quiet until Mallory moved to New York.

  Among Mailer’s close friends, the affair caused consternation, but he waved off every warning. The relationship was based on passion, according to Mailer’s lawyer, Ivan Fisher. “It was a huge part of his being. And a huge part of his passion was sex. And his relationship with Mallory was 100 percent sexual. Period. There wasn’t the teeniest, tiniest nanogram of anything other than sex involved there. If you are looking for an idea, read her book . . . Flash, yes. And you’ll know exactly what this affair was about. It wound up causing [Norris] enormous pain.” Flash is Mallory’s 1988 novel about an alcoholic, sexaholic, drug-abusing female flasher. “Mallory packs her story with down-and-dirty sexual details,” said one reviewer. Mailer gave it a blurb, as did Gloria Steinem. By the time the book was published, Norris realized that Mallory, unlike Mailer’s other mistresses, lacked discretion, but not determination. She wanted to become the seventh Mrs. Mailer. The protagonist of her novel is trying, after an affair with a French millionaire, to win a major role in a film via the casting couch. Her true passion, however, is for Sacha Sachtel, a sixty-year-old producer, the “King of Kink,” modeled on Mailer.

  Gay Talese, who knew Mallory from Elaine’s, recalls being at a literary event in the late 1980s where he was approached by Norris. “Mailer was somewhere [else], I don’t know, but it was a big event, maybe something for PEN,” he recalled. “Anyway, she came to me and said, ‘I’m going to leave Norman.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because he’s fucking around,’ she said. ‘He’s having affairs.’ I’m surprised because I thought it was still a relatively new marriage. She was quite gorgeous. I knew he was having affairs, but I said, ‘You know, you shouldn’t do that. With Mailer, it’s just a little adventure, none of them means anything.’ She was pretty pissed off.” She was not angry enough to leave him, however.

  Barbara met Mallory through her brother. “He sicced her on me when I was working at Simon and Schuster,” she recalled. “I didn’t ask any questions, but I guessed he was trying to buy her off because she presented me with a couple of manuscripts which were just ghastly.” She realized that there was nothing she could do with Mallory’s work. “I wished I could because I figured this would be one way to help him—one of the manuscripts was about all the men she had slept with. Norman was not in it. I figured maybe he had asked her to keep him out of it.” When asked about her motives in 2006, Mailer said, “She was totally on the make.” Fisher’s interpretation notwithstanding, Mailer had more than one reason for continuing his relationship.

  In a 1973 interview with Buzz Farbar, Mailer described the four stages of knowing a woman.

  First, there’s living together. It’s often thought equal to marriage. Not by half. You can live with a woman and never begin to comprehend her at all, not until you get married to her. Once you do that, you’re in the next stage. The third, obviously, is children. Once again your woman is different. Say it’s analogous to a culture going through major transformations. The fourth stage is knowing a woman once you’re divorced. Then, indeed, you come to know something at last. So if it weren’t for the fact that there are children, there would be something agreeable about moving from marriage
to marriage, just as there is something exciting about spending five years in England and five in France. But there are children, and that’s the vortex of all postmarital pain, which is always so surprisingly huge. Because finally the children come out of a vision in the marriage.

  He does not mention the stage of a relationship that precedes living together: an affair. Besides Mallory, he was still seeing Carol Stevens, and whenever he visited Chicago, Eileen Fredrickson. He called her regularly. When he was on the West Coast, he rarely failed to spend time with Lois Wilson. They had a long correspondence. With these very different women, he never felt beleaguered and enjoyed friendship, sexual intimacy, dining out, and conversation. No strings. There were other affairs, but these were the most important.

  One way to understand Mailer’s relationship with Carole Mallory is to see it as part of his lust for experience, which he once defined as “the church—if the word may be allowed—of one’s acquired knowledge.” Experience was holy. His sister remembers him telling her, in so many words, that “experience was more valuable when you felt that you could, you know, turn it into art. Otherwise, there wasn’t much point to it.” Women were of inexhaustible interest to him—mysterious, dangerous, of infinite variety. Mallory was unlike anyone he had known before. He was fascinated by her crassness and amazed by her promiscuity, which seemed to match his own. There was so much to learn. When he was asked by Cosmopolitan his opinion of a woman if “she sleeps with you too soon,” he replied: “No woman has ever slept with me too soon. I don’t pretend I’m typical, but I’ve always found promiscuous women interesting. I suspect I would have been promiscuous if I’d been a woman. I certainly have been as a man. So I don’t make judgments. The faster a woman would sleep with me, the more I liked her.”