Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Schiller asked Mailer to write the script for a miniseries, but unlike the O. J. Simpson teleplay, where he had worked from Schiller’s book, the Hanssen project required travel and research. In the months following the arrest, Mailer and Schiller again took to the road, this time to interview people associated with the man responsible for what former FBI director William Webster described as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.” They traveled around the United States and to London and Moscow to speak with family members, Russian and U.S. intelligence agents who had worked with Hanssen, his closest friends (including Catholic priests), and one of the psychiatrists who interviewed him after his arrest. The two people they most wanted to interview were Hanssen and his wife, Bonnie. Mailer wrote to her in April.

  No one can understand what you have had to contend with these past days, and I recognize that this letter is one more imposition. Nonetheless, I believe I have acquired some understanding of the complexity of the human spirit over the years, and I have learned not to sit in quick judgment. As matters now stand, I will be writing a screenplay for CBS. It will not be cheap or sensational. By all the accounts of the people to whom we have spoken already, your husband possesses a mind that is complicated and second in intelligence to few others. That is the way I will present him in the teleplay.

  He ended by saying that he would do his best to protect her privacy, and would not “go at the story like a journalist who has a deadline to meet and so lives with the temptation to distort the material in order to excite his reader’s attention.” Because both Hanssens later signed plea bargain agreements with the Justice Department, Mailer and Schiller were unable to interview either.

  On September 11, 2001, Mailer was in Provincetown working on the teleplay when his daughter Maggie, who was staying at his Brooklyn apartment with a clear view of the World Trade Center, called him about the attack. Like millions of others, she was “terribly affected,” he said. For the next few days, he watched television constantly. “That only happens a few times in your life,” he said. “Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Maybe ten times.” His first reaction was to feel left out: “Being up in Provincetown, 300 miles away, the bit of blood that’s still journalistic felt wistful.”

  Right after the disaster, in a telephone interview, Mailer called the World Trade Center “an architectural monstrosity” and offered the opinion that if no one had been killed “a lot of people would have cheered to see the towers destroyed.” He went on to say that the terrorists who carried out the attack were “brilliant.” To do such a thing required courage, but most Americans were convinced that the act was carried out by “blind, mad fanatics who didn’t know what they were doing.” It was time to “take a calm look” in order to understand what motivated a mission of such horrific destruction. In a second telephone interview, he said that most Americans didn’t understand that in many countries, Americans were seen as “cultural oppressors” who erect “high rise buildings until the meanest, scummiest capital in the world will nonetheless have a ring of high-rise hotels and buildings around their airports. A lot of people resent it profoundly.” If the United States did not recognize the damage caused by its “huge, profit-making way of life,” he concluded, “we are going to be the most hated nation on earth.”

  A few months later when he was in Vienna, he was awarded the Honorary Cross for Science and Art, First Class, the highest honor Austria can give to an artist. The speaker on the occasion, Günther Nenning, one of the founders of Austria’s Green Party, pointed to the merits of Mailer’s brand of patriotism.

  We small Austrians have a very clear position towards your great America. We are always for America and always against America. Always for America because we want to be protected and because, in the global clash of civilizations, we belong after all to the West. Always against America because in our central European souls, there is a lot of arrogance coupled with anger and envy. It is therefore a great relief when Mailer shoulders our anti-American burden because you can’t be more anti-American than this great American. Norman Mailer has a European concept of patriotism: he loves his country not how it is but how it should be.

  The 9/11 attack, and then President George W. Bush’s decision to launch the Iraq War, revitalized Mailer’s energies as a Jeremiah after his interest in national issues had flagged during the Clinton years. He would publish two polemical books focused on the arrogance of American wealth and imperialistic ambitions: Why Are We at War? in 2003, and The Big Empty (with his son John Buffalo) in 2006.

  The Hanssen teleplay was completed by November, at which time Schiller decided to write a nonfiction narrative based on Mailer’s script, adding more information from other sources. It was published the following May as Into the Mirror: The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen, and was another bestseller for Schiller. The miniseries, which was well received, was broadcast on CBS in two parts on November 10 and 17, with William Hurt as Hanssen and Mary-Louise Parker as his wife. Mailer was paid $250,000 for the teleplay, and the income enabled him to keep up with his huge monthly expenses, approximately $50,000. The Hitler novel was years away and Mailer felt obliged to come up with a book for Random House—it had been four years since The Time of Our Time. In early 2002, he began to think seriously about a project Lennon suggested. Mailer’s insights and anecdotes about the craft of writing were scattered in several of his books, in various collections, uncollected interviews, transcripts of television programs and in talks he had given. “Presented with the cache,” Mailer wrote in the acknowledgments to the resulting book, “I began to see that the form of a legitimate work was present, barely visible, but with the unmistakable heft of a book.” In early February 2002, he began to delineate the contents of what would be The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing.

  On February 10, just as he was beginning, he received word that Jack Abbott, who had been denied parole in 2001, had committed suicide. Michael Kuzma, who had advised Abbott in a lawsuit against the state of New York about a beating he had received in prison two years earlier, said that he was not satisfied that Abbott had killed himself. Abbott had told him that he was worried about his safety. He was discovered hanging from a sheet and a shoelace in his cell. Bill Majeski, the detective responsible for his capture, questioned whether it was suicide. “Everybody hated him,” he said. Abbott’s sister, Frances Amador, also doubted it was suicide. “But it’s not something you can prove,” she said. Abbott’s ex-wife, Naomi Zack, noted that Abbott’s eye disease and dental problems may have been factors. He tried to kill himself at least twice before, she said. Henry Howard, the father-in-law of Richard Adan, said, “That’s the third person he murdered, and he got the right one.”

  When informed of Abbott’s death, Adan’s widow said, “I am happy he will not kill again.” In a 1990 law suit, she had been awarded $7.5 million in damages, to be paid out of Abbott’s royalties from his two books. She received approximately $115,000. Mailer, who had not corresponded with Abbott since 1986, issued a statement: “His life was tragic from beginning to end. I never knew a man who had a worse life. What made it doubly awful is that he brought a deadly tragedy down on one young man full of promise and left a bomb-crater of lost possibilities for many, including most especially himself.” Abbott left a suicide note, but its contents have never been disclosed.

  NORRIS’S FATHER HAD a heart condition, and in the spring of 2002 began to decline. She flew to Arkansas several times to help her mother, usually accompanied by either Matt or John. On July 21, after a long hospital stay, James Davis died. After the funeral, Norris tried to convince her eighty-three-year-old mother to move to Provincetown, but Gaynell refused. She had diabetes and didn’t drive; she had never written a check, and was afraid to be alone at night. After Gaynell broke her ankle four months later, Norris got her to agree, after considerable cajoling, to move to Provincetown. Norris was now driving her husband, her mother, and herself to doctors’ appointments in Boston and Hyannis, as we
ll as shopping, cooking, and running the house. Mailer, who would be eighty in a few months, rarely drove anymore. Gaynell was miserable and wanted to return to Arkansas. She and her son-in-law were usually cordial, but it was “like they were from different planets,” Norris said. Depressed and lonely, Norris’s mother, a devout Baptist, found almost everything on television sinful and repugnant and “did nothing all day except sit and read in a chair tucked into a small room off the living room, the black ink of her mood seeping out all around her.”

  Added to Norris’s load was a nonpaying position as artistic director of the Provincetown Repertory Theater, which she enjoyed but was able to handle only with the help of her production manager, David Fortuna. Mailer, remembering the successful reading of Don Juan in Hell they had done nine years earlier, proposed a benefit performance to aid the always needy theater. He contacted Vidal and asked him to reprise his role as the Devil. Norris would take the part of Doña Ana, Don Juan’s former paramour; Lennon would play her father, the Commodore; and Mailer would be Don Juan, and direct. Vidal accepted immediately and flew in from his home in Rapallo, Italy, for rehearsals. Norris thought that Vidal got involved to make up to Mailer for his Charles Manson remark years earlier.

  Vidal stayed at a nearby guesthouse, but came to the Mailers’ every morning for breakfast. Norris recalled the “wild and wooly week” in her memoir: “Rehearsal all day, some kind of lunch, and dinner, ending with a late night of drinking and verbal sparring between Norman and Gore in our bar. I didn’t for the life of me see how Gore was making it so well. He had more energy than all of us combined. We were all exhausted.” Lennon recalls dropping off Vidal at the White Horse in Provincetown, watching him pour himself a Scotch nightcap, and then returning in the morning to find him lying fully dressed on his bed with the glass still in his hand. The seventy-seven-year-old Vidal popped up and went right back to work.

  Don Juan in Hell is a ninety-minute dream sequence in the third act of Shaw’s Man and Superman. It is often cut from productions of the play, one of Shaw’s greatest, and performed separately. Mailer trimmed Don Juan to sixty minutes and made further refinements during rehearsal. Vidal knew his part almost by heart and while he listened politely to Mailer’s suggestions, played the role his own way. On the night of the performance, October 12, Vidal, wearing his jacket with the dark red lining, told Mailer, “Norman, when I walk on that stage, you are going to hear a roar of applause the likes of which you have never heard.” Vidal flashed the lining as he walked on stage, and the applause was indeed loud. A reviewer said, “the reading flowed and had sparks of brilliance,” especially in the Devil’s arguments for the superiority of his abode over the dull place above. The four dissect with every weapon of wit and rhetoric the great philosophical questions, culminating in a masterful set of exchanges between Don Juan and the Devil on the merits of the Life Force. It is brilliant dialogue, perhaps Shaw’s finest. “If you were scoring the bout, it would go to Vidal,” said the reviewer, who called Vidal’s portrayal “flawless.” Mailer agreed that Vidal was terrific, “almost as good as Charles Laughton in playing that role.”

  About the same time as the Don Juan in Hell performance, Mailer submitted the final manuscript of The Spooky Art. A party was planned for publication day, which would also be a joint birthday celebration, and invitations went out to over two hundred friends.

  “The portals of eternity,” to use Mailer’s phrase, were on his mind, and he spoke more and more about his grave, his will, his epitaph, and his physical deterioration. In a letter to his boxing pal Sal Cetrano, he brought up the question of organ transplants. If modern science could provide us with a new liver, he wrote, “after we’d corrupted the juice out of the old one, then who was going to benefit? Some of the worst and lousiest and richest people on earth, tyrants, tycoons and so forth.” There would be no opportunity to “look forward to some horrible old bastard dying.” One’s approaching death should lead to “the most serious meditation one could ever engage in,” a process that would be disrupted by the possibility of “popping in new organs.”

  I tell you, Sal, I get nervous about the possibilities of human nature even making it through the next century. We’re just too fucked up, too determined to take over the savvy, the realm of genius of the Creator. I expect it’s because we’re prodigiously dissatisfied after the 20th Century with His or Her inability to come to our aid in times of terrible historic stress, but then, none of these liberals out there ever seem to recognize that the Devil may be just as powerful as God, and you can’t lay blame on the first party who is probably doing the best He or She can do under these dreadfully parlous circumstances.

  Showing the powers of the Evil One (as the Devil is referred to in The Castle in the Forest) as he and other evil spirits wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls—Hitler’s especially—would be one of the chief preoccupations of the novel he was writing, and Mailer was perfectly willing to believe that organ transplants were a demonic activity. He was making good progress on the novel, losing only a few months to assemble The Spooky Art. In between performances of Zelda, Scott, & Ernest in the fall of 2002, he and Norris had driven across Germany to Vienna, accompanied by their Austrian friends Hans and Freidl Janitschek, stopping to see the Dachau concentration camp, Hitler’s Berchtesgaden retreat, and locales in Upper Austria where he had lived as a boy, which would be the main setting of the novel.

  Several weeks after they returned, Norris learned that her cancer had recurred. The birthday party was canceled. The new tumors were removed surgically, and a port was implanted in her abdomen. A strong drug was dripped into the port and she rolled over and over in her bed so that it would bathe her intestines. This went on for several weeks and exhausted her. Her sons and friends helped her, but her husband, she said, “pretty much left me to myself.”

  Cancer had always been Norman’s metaphor for evil, and now here was his wife, suffused with it. Was it his fault? Had he given it to me? It weighed on him, tormented him, and caused him to stay away from me. He moved into the bedroom down the hall, which hurt me at first, but the luxury of having my own bathroom and my own TV compensated.

  Her weight dropped to 103, and for a time she had to wear a colostomy bag. She joked about it, telling her friends that she was going to “design a ‘Bag Bag,’ in all different colors and fabrics, so people could wear them outside their clothing,” instead of hiding them. Mailer helped by doing some of the cooking. He was having chest pains, but refused to see his doctor in Boston, and began “popping nitroglycerine tablets like they were candy.” Gaynell was still in a slough of despond, especially when she realized that she would not be returning to Arkansas. Aurora Huston came for a week, as did Christina Pabst, a friend from the Actors Studio, and the children helped whenever they could. Finally, the Mailers decided to hire a waiter from a local restaurant, Dwayne Raymond, whom they found to be both congenial and bright. He would work as cook, personal assistant, and a bit later, typist and researcher. Raymond would also become one of Norris’s confidants. He worked for the family until Mailer died four years later.

  THE RECEPTION FOR The Spooky Art was surprisingly warm, given the fact that it is an omnium-gatherum containing little original writing. Some slack, perhaps, was given to the old lion on his eightieth birthday. There was some debate about how skillfully Mailer had cobbled together cuttings from over two hundred different sources, but most reviewers found the book to be a thoughtful analysis of the psychological aspects of the writing life. Michiko Kakutani, again reviewing the book before almost everyone else, praised the sections on craft—point of view choices and the struggle to create a style—and Mailer’s “keenly perceptive” comments on the weaknesses of his own books, but overall she found the book to be “startlingly” uneven. She compared it to the blather of a “garrulous raconteur” next to you on a long bus ride, sometimes compelling but also benumbing in his “self-absorption, his defensiveness, his capacity for wacky mumbo jumbo.” Her summati
on: “Such ridiculous, self-indulgent nattering is just the sort of thing that won Mr. Mailer a reputation as a ‘criminally egomaniacal’ writer in his heyday, and distracted attention from his better work.” For Kakutani, self-effacement stands near the summit of writerly virtue.

  Mailer, characteristically, was of two minds about the merits of detachment. Kakutani quotes approvingly his negative stance on the question: “Writers aren’t taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. We haven’t written the books that should have been written. We’ve spent too much time exploring ourselves. We haven’t done the imaginative work that could have helped define America, and as a result, our average citizen does not grow in self-understanding.”

  Other reviews found merit in Mailer’s self-spelunking. Both James Campbell (The New York Times Book Review) and Ron Rosenbaum (New York Observer) found introspection to be one of the collection’s virtues. Echoing the judgments of Harold Bloom and Alfred Kazin, Campbell says that readers go to Mailer’s books chiefly “for his alertness to ‘every intimation about himself,’ which he has expressed with greater vivacity than any contemporary.” Rosenbaum says that in Advertisements for Myself Mailer “broke ground for every memoirist who’s put pen to paper since,” and lauds him for “finding a way—in Armies of the Night to write about the personal and the metaphysical, the personal and the ideological, and even the personal and the theological.” Years earlier in his review of Armies of the Night, Alfred Kazin remarked that Walt Whitman was just as “outrageous an egoist and actor as Mailer.” Like Whitman, Mailer had bouts of narcissism, but then got bored with himself. Then the cycle repeated. The salutary effect of this alternation, which runs through Mailer’s work from the late 1950s on, is often overlooked. His self-promotion and his self-effacement, his blather and his brilliance, cannot be separated. As Walter Goodman, a Times colleague of Kakutani’s, said of Mailer, “At his most engaging, he manages to be off the wall and on the mark at the same time.”