Of course, the subject being interviewed didn’t know what we were saying, because they didn’t speak English, and sometimes he [Mailer] would get up and walk out of the room, saying, “You go finish the goddam interview yourself then.” Or sometimes we would both go outside, sometimes Ludmilla would turn around and scream at us, saying, “What are you guys doing? Why are you fighting in front of somebody?”
Toward the end of their stay, Schiller came to the conclusion that they would need copies of large portions of the original files in order to have credibility with the media in the United States. Without such copies, Schiller asked himself, how can we prove that we’re quoting from actual KGB reports? He concluded that they could not leave Minsk without copies of all the bugging reports.
Mailer wasn’t worried in the least about credibility, Schiller said. He felt that his own name and voice carried sufficient weight. When Schiller told him he planned to give Sharkovsky’s assistant $10,000 for three sets of copies of the reports, “Norman went ballistic.” He was worried that they would be arrested for bribing high officials. Shoes were one thing; $10,000 in American money was another. They got into a loud argument in the stairwell outside Mailer’s apartment, wrestling and pushing each other down the steps. “It was really an altercation,” Schiller said. “He finally understood that I was not going to retreat.” For a few weeks they weren’t speaking, and then Schiller told him that he had paid the bribe. Now Mailer had to listen. Schiller’s plan was for Mailer, himself, and Ludmilla (now married to Schiller) to leave from three different airports. Each would have a set of the reports. “If one of us was arrested,” he said, “that made the drama, made the book more important because we would be taking out something that the West was unable to get their hands on. And that was my final argument to him: that if we were stopped at customs, we would actually be promoting the book. Mailer’s answer was, ‘Fine, as long as I am not the one who is arrested.’ ” Schiller told him that on the contrary he would be the most desirable person to be caught with the files. It would be a major story in the media worldwide, which could only help the book. Mailer saw his point.
Schiller would leave from Moscow, Ludmilla from Leningrad, and Mailer from Minsk. “We were worried,” Schiller said. “I remember the night before I left I had bad cramps in my legs and I had to lie in the bathtub in the hotel.” But their fears were unfounded. They were working with the KGB, paying them rent every week, and no one paid any attention to them at the airports. Their suitcases weren’t even opened. The fix was in.
BACK IN THE States in the spring of 1993, John Aldridge noted in passing to Mailer that Judith was not terribly forthcoming when he asked for information on the telephone. Mailer, who had ceded a great deal of control over his public life—and some of his private—to his assistant, responded by noting that “Judith still treats me like an undergraduate and, for the record, whatever my talents, they do not include training Judith. Like Gore Vidal, she’s untrainable; comes to you fully developed and you thank god for what you’ve got and put up with what you’re not going to get.” Mailer dictated this letter, and as usual Judith typed it, which added to the comic dimensions of their relationship. She could hold her own in repartee with him, and never hesitated to point out, wryly, the dangers of various rash ideas he had. Mailer valued her verbal skills, research abilities, and wit. They spoke on the telephone daily, sometimes several times, and when Mailer was in Provincetown he faxed whatever he had written to her for typing. A lot of material passed between them in this way. The fax machine is one of the few pieces of recent technology that Mailer deigned to use. Even so, he was ham-handed and broke several of them.
Mailer also told Aldridge about his research for “a book on Oswald in Minsk,” one of his few comments on it in a letter. “Oswald,” he said, “is a man of parts,” and he hoped to depict “a character who’s worthy, to some little degree, of the size that history has given him. At least he won’t be a stick figure in a CIA/KGB set of scenarios.” One of the ways he hoped to demonstrate that Oswald was worthy of a full-scale portrait was through the memories and insights of his widow, now remarried and living in Texas. Schiller had interviewed Marina earlier for an ABC-TV docudrama on Oswald. For the new project, he offered her $15,000 for five days of interviews in June of 1993.
During his earlier visit with Bill Majeski, Mailer had interviewed Marina for a few hours. But, now, with the Minsk interviews in hand, he and Schiller had many more questions and needed to conduct extended interviews with her. Schiller had a friendly relationship with her, but nevertheless had to use all his resources to convince her. Mailer, who once noted that “Larry Schiller makes Baron Von Munchausen look like George Washington,” described his collaborator’s methods. “Larry can be utterly unscrupulous,” he said, “so he went around telling everyone with whom we wanted to do interviews, I was the American Tolstoy, and they owed it to history to be interviewed by us. He also succeeded in getting Marina Oswald to sit down with us for a few days and talk.” She came with a friend to the sessions in a Dallas hotel, but for the interviews—three hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, and two in the evening—Marina would be alone with Mailer, Schiller, and a Russian-English dictionary.
The interviews started off well with questions about noncontroversial matters—the date she moved to Minsk, relationships with Aunt Valya and Uncle Ilya, where she worked, and so forth. They also asked more general questions: Did she and Oswald live as a couple in the United States about the same way as in Minsk? Had she understood that he would not be guaranteed a job in the United States as he had been in the Soviet Union? What did she remember about the time before the assassination when Oswald tried to shoot General Edwin Walker? She had gone over this ground before with the FBI; much of this material was in the Warren Commission Report. Mailer and Schiller also had a wealth of information from people in Leningrad and Minsk, so when they moved into more difficult territory, they could cross-check her replies.
On the third day, the questioning got tougher. As Schiller put it, “We started with Vaseline, but we knew we were going to end up with vinegar.” They began asking about the time her uncle locked the door when she was out late with a boyfriend and she had to sleep on the landing. “She looked at me with real hatred in her eyes,” and began screaming: “You’re worse than the Secret Service; you’re worse than the FBI.” Schiller used the same tactic he had used on Nicole Baker for The Executioner’s Song. “What do you have to hide?” he asked. Marina could have walked out at any time; Schiller had given her a cashier’s check on the first day. “That is my modus operandi,” he said. “I always want to take a little bit of the high road. I don’t know if it produces something good or not, but you know she showed up every day.” Mailer was interested in her early sexuality and particularly eager to learn how the blood got on the sheet that Oswald displayed to his coworkers. Eventually, she opened up and told them that she was not a virgin when she married Oswald, but she never explained how she deceived him on their wedding night. She called Schiller a liar when he brought up the story of the bloody sheet. “You can’t use your capitalistic tricks on me,” she screamed.
Marina felt betrayed, Schiller said, because she had assumed their relationship was personal, not adversarial. Her awe of Mailer had evaporated. On the final day, relations soured entirely. “Every single word out of her mouth was said with venom,” said Schiller. They had pressed her hard, and all bridges were burned. The next morning, she and her friend drove away. No goodbyes, no hugs. Two years later Schiller sent an advance excerpt from the first part of the book to Marina. “We had a moral obligation, not a legal obligation, to let her know beforehand what Norman Mailer thought and was writing of her,” Schiller said. She wrote back an angry letter to Schiller criticizing Mailer. “Tolstoy, he’s not!” she said.
Mailer began writing in Provincetown in the summer of 1993, planning, as usual, to be done long before he was. He told one friend that he would be done by the end of the year
“or my publishers will be in misery.” Most of his correspondents got Xerox copies of one of his drawings, doodles, and cartoons, and faces made of numbers, an idea he says he got from Picasso, who as a boy thought the number seven was an upside-down nose. He would continue to send out these drawings—most had captions—to the end of his life, often with a handwritten note. One of the few letters he did write in the second half of the year was to Peter Balbert, a professor at Trinity University who had hosted Mailer when he spoke there.
I hope eventually this book will have offshoots that prove interesting for the second volume of Harlot’s Ghost. For now it’s been an experience of some interest. I can tell you that I never disliked Ronald Reagan more than when I was in Russia and Belarus (Minsk) for whatever the old Soviet Union was, you can’t call it an evil empire. A depressed, oppressive third-world country but an evil empire that would take over the world? Never.
He ended by noting that his Picasso book, which was “not at all a major effort,” was almost done. Picasso “comes alive” in it, he said, and he had “more honest things to say about Cubism than the artistic establishmentarians.”
THE REASON THAT the Picasso book had not yet gone to press was the opposition of these establishmentarians, none more so than John Richardson. Earlier in the year, Epstein had sent a manuscript copy of Mailer’s book to Richardson. He wrote back, called it a “scissors-and-paste job,” and turned down Mailer’s request to quote from his biography. He and Mailer, hitherto friendly, began sniping at each other in the media. When Richardson read about a Provincetown exhibit of Mailer’s drawings, “Guys and Droons,” Richardson told the New York Observer, “He’s not just writing about Picasso now, he’s even trying to draw like Picasso.” Mailer said that while he had no artistic ability, he had merely “let my hand, in a sense, lead me—that is, draw without preconception. There must have been some wholly unconscious message I’d gotten from Picasso.” Told of Richardson’s disdain for his drawings, he said, “I hope the poor boy is not too disappointed,” and quoted the André Gide epigraph in The Deer Park: “Please do not understand me too quickly.” Richardson went further, accusing Mailer of writing the book as a way of funding his alimony and child care payments.
Another Picasso scholar, William Rubin, sided with Richardson. Director emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Rubin had recently published a major study, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, from which Mailer had drawn extensively. Rubin refused permission for Mailer to quote from his work. “Obviously, Richardson sicced him on me,” Mailer said. He was now in an unhappy situation that would interfere with his work on the Oswald book. Lacking the ability to quote from Richardson and Rubin, and possibly from the memoirs of Fernande Olivier (whose heirs were initially unresponsive), he would have to rewrite the book. And he would have to find another publisher. His first thought was Nan Talese, wife of his good friend, Gay, who had her own imprint at Doubleday. He had known her socially for years.
“As I understood it,” she recalled, “Norman said to Jason, ‘Would it be helpful if I go find another publisher just for this book?’ And I think Jason said yes because it took the pressure off of him. So Norman asked me to read it and publish it. And I said, ‘I’ll publish it.’ And he said, ‘No, no, I think you should read it first.’ ” She read the book and was impressed. “I loved the book because I felt if there was anyone who could get inside Picasso’s spirit and sense of self-importance, it was Norman.” She saw this ability in his descriptions of the young Picasso, which seemed “as if he was associating his own feelings as a young writer with Picasso as a young artist.” She had some editorial suggestions, and Mailer sat down with her and the manuscript. “What was wonderful was when I asked him a question either about motive or meaning or something like that, he immediately addressed it. He didn’t say let me think about it; he had a pencil and would go over it.”
Richardson said he would sue if Talese published Mailer’s book. “Well, this is just my guess,” she said, but his “underlying motive” might have been Mailer’s discussion of Cubism. “That was going to be part of Richardson’s next book.” She said, “Norman had a theory of why Picasso was attracted to Cubism, and I think he was jumping the tracks” on Richardson’s second volume, which was forthcoming. At this point she was still determined to publish and called Random House president Harry Evans. “I said, ‘Harry, could you get John to just pull back so we can go ahead with this book?’ And he did.” Richardson relented and gave permission to quote, although William Rubin did not—he was not quoted in the draft Talese read. But Talese’s boss decided not to publish because he feared that “John Richardson has spoiled everything, and this book is going to be trashed, and we’re not going to make our money back on it.”
Mailer had yet to sign a contract with Doubleday, and when Talese called him with the bad news, he was understanding. He asked if she could not go ahead on her own and publish it, and she explained that she could, but she wouldn’t get any marketing money, and “it’s not fair to the book.” It was published instead by Grove/Atlantic.
GERALD POSNER’S CASE CLOSED was published just a few weeks before Mailer was the keynote speaker at the third annual Assassination Symposium on John F. Kennedy (ASK) in Dallas, November 18–22, 1993. Posner, after extensive research, concluded that Oswald had acted alone. His view, generally embraced by the media, cast a slight pall on the conference. Mailer, long a supporter of conspiracy theories, did not mention Posner’s book, but he had read it, and in his speech seemed to be moving closer to Posner’s position, a stance not appreciated by the symposiasts, the great majority of whom were ferocious opponents of the single assassin interpretation. Mailer said that we want to believe that Oswald was a tool of some intelligence agency because we don’t like to be lied to, and neither the CIA nor the FBI was willing to open their Oswald files. This stonewalling encouraged conspiracy proponents. But Mailer was now uncertain and told the audience that they had become intoxicated by the “vertigo and fog that accompanies study of the conspiracy.”
By the time of the symposium, he had been working for several months on the story of Oswald and Marina in Minsk, but before he was done he decided that he did not want the book to end there. He was more and more intrigued by Oswald’s personality, which he felt had not been understood, and less and less convinced that Oswald was either a tool of the KGB, or a scapegoat for Mafia dons who had had JFK murdered. These theories, and countless others, were dissected at the symposium, and Mailer was growing weary of them. Like Don DeLillo (also a conspiratorialist), he wanted to dissect Oswald with the tools of a novelist, demonstrate that Oswald was not a monstrous nobody, but an understandable character with grandiose ambitions and courage. “The sudden death of a man as large in his possibilities as John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” he wrote, “is more tolerable if we can perceive his killer as tragic rather than absurd.”
Mailer called the assassination “the largest mountain of mystery in the Twentieth Century.” Yet until Oswald’s Tale, as the book Schiller and he conceived was called, he had never dealt with it head-on, only obliquely via its endless reverberations in the nation’s psyche. In book after book, essay after essay, he alluded to it, adding rings of scaffolding around it, as if it could only be approached but not addressed. He planned to make the assassination the opening episode of “Harlot’s Grave.” Reading chunks of the Warren Commission Report through the long Russian winter was the precipitating event. He likened the report to “a dead whale decomposing on the beach,” fascinating, pungent, and mysterious. “Every morning I’d read these juicy testimonies, and every afternoon and evening we’d have these interviews, and soon I was struck by how desperate Oswald was, how focused he was on a belief in himself, however delusional.”
Back home in the spring of 1993, he went to work on “Oswald and Marina in Minsk.” As he was completing it, he decided to add a hundred-page epilogue about Oswald in America. He told his publishers, and they said, “Oh
, don’t make it too long,” and he replied, “Of course not.” But when he completed the epilogue, it had become the biggest part of the book, 444 pages, compared to 347 for the Minsk portion. “I started with one book and ended with another,” he said. After thirty years, he had finally found a way to write about that dark day in Dallas, “a huge and hideous event, in which the gods warred and a god fell,” as he described it. At Random House, no one was happy. “You’ve got a rose,” Harry Evans told him, “why put all that greenery around it.” Epstein felt the same way.
Schiller thought Mailer was “out of his mind,” and told him so. “We haven’t done any research in the U.S.,” he said. “There’s no new information. I told him it was total insanity.” But Mailer had been reading the Warren Commission Report, and saw a wealth of material. “All you’re doing is a cut-and-paste job,” Schiller said. “There isn’t anything new in what you’re doing.” Mailer’s old friend was making the same accusation that Richardson had made about Mailer’s Picasso biography. “He got real mad at me, you know, really mad,” Schiller said. “I was treading on his creativity.” Mailer deferred to Schiller when it came to collecting information, but deferred to no one when it came to interpreting information. He believed he could extract the same kind of compelling story out of the vast corpus of inert material assembled by the Warren Commission as he had out of the trove of interviews and documents on Gary Gilmore that Schiller had collected. The second half of Oswald’s Tale is a much abbreviated and expertly parsed redaction of the Warren Commission Report.
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