What I found next was a forty-five-minute video labeled “Norman Mailer Documentary Interview Outtake.” The still above the link was of a slim woman, white-haired, in a skirt suit, cream-colored, possibly linen. She was sitting in a leather armchair; beside her, a wooden side table held a bucket of ice, a crystal decanter partially filled with brown liquid, and a square glass, it too partially filled with liquid, though of a lighter brown color, the color of whiskey or bourbon diluted by ice. Her left hand was at her neck, two fingers touching a string of pearls. I clicked. As the video buffered, I read the description: “Outtake from Mailer: An American Life (2005). Raw footage, interview subject unknown.” The first comment below was irate: “who is this woman is and why did they interviewed her?? skimmed whole video (to long)) and she doesnt seem to kno anything about mailer just complains about her husband dont watch if ur interested in mailer hes is a great american writer (and check out his movies to!!) this woman is just some old bitch!!!” There was a reply immediately below from the same commenter. “In case you’re wondering I do know how to spell and also all the rules of grammar, in fact I’m very well read, I was just too infuriated to care. Lol. :)” In the fourteen days since the video had been posted, one hundred and twelve people had watched it. Seventy had given it a thumbs-down. The video was done buffering.
“Tell me,” a voice offscreen said, “about the party.”
“Yes,” the woman onscreen said, “there was a party. It was Norman Mailer’s party. It was 1960 and I was dating a man named Bill and Bill said Norman Mailer was throwing a party and we were invited.” She was wearing coral-colored lipstick on slim, wrinkled lips. Lipstick the color of Florida, the color of retirement and open-toed orthopedic sandals and parchment-thin skin, cool and dry in the air-conditioning. “I put on a silk sheath dress,” she said, “peach-colored with flowers embroidered in bronze and cream thread. Bill said Norman was running for mayor.” Her right ankle was crossed over her left. With her right thumb and index finger, she turned the glass in a circle on its coaster. “Bill said, Everyone important is going to be there. Bill said, George Plimpton is going to be there, and I said, Does George like a girl in gloves?”
“What happened,” a voice offscreen said, “at the party?”
“It was a joke,” the woman onscreen said. No acknowledgment of the question, not even a dismissive wave. “It was a joke but also I didn’t know who George Plimpton was, only that I was supposed to be impressed with him. Bill laughed. I barely knew who Norman was. I brought my gloves, just in case. The dress was decorated, at the waist, with a flat little bow, also pink, and the flowers were abstracted. Very chic, very Rothko.” She smiled. “That’s what I thought. Actually they looked like eggs from a distance. Like single eggs, mid-fry.” She turned her head to cough.
“When you got—”
“My hair was straight as a board and I’d spent twenty minutes, before the party, curling the ends under. George Plimpton did end up being there, though he was gone by the time it happened.”
“Yes, if you could—”
“With the ends curled under my hair just grazed the tops of my shoulders. It was auburn then, my hair was”—the woman touched her soft white bun—“in the right light. Bill knew Norman,” she continued, “because he’d been at Rinehart when The Naked and the Dead came out. He’d been the novel’s copy editor, which mostly meant changing all the fucks to fugs and all the fuckings to fuggings and also getting yelled at by Norman. Every time he saw a typo in the proofs, Norman would call Bill up and start yelling. No use explaining to Norman that it was the typesetter’s fault. Years passed”—she took a sip from the glass—“and then they ran into each other again, at a party in the Village, or maybe it was in fact a Village Voice party, I forget. Norman was gesticulating and he bumped Bill’s hand and Bill said, Watch your fugging hands, prick, and Norman turned, his mouth a kind of snarl—Bill always made this funny face when he told the story—and said, Who the fuck are you, and Bill said, It’s fug, Mr. Mailer, I’m afraid we can’t print fuck, and Norman said, Where do I know that—And then he was laughing and his arms were around Bill’s torso, wrestling him into a bear hug. Bill’s drink got all over Norman’s shirt but Norman wasn’t angry, took off his shirt, good-natured, went and got him another drink. Anyway, after that, Norman started inviting Bill to parties—”
“Speaking of parties, if we could—”
“—calling him from the phone booth outside the Fire Spot or the Open Door.” She spoke a bit louder, was the only indication that she’d been aware of the interruption. “And sometimes when Norman called I was with Bill and then we went together. This was fifty-eight or fifty-nine. At first Norman liked when I showed up with Bill. I was twenty in fifty-eight, long legs and high breasts, a little bitty waist cinched in between. I was”—her eyes were aimed at a spot to the left of the camera and here they narrowed—“gorgeous though I suppose it’s hard to tell now, back then a young man would have at least pretended to—”
“I’m sorry, of course, it’s only with our schedule, I’m sure you understand, Ms.—”
“Never mind, never mind,” one hand waving. “What was I—right, I was going to say that I was taller than Norman in stocking feet, which is true. He was a short man. I towered over him in heels. I think he thought I was a WASP, which I wasn’t, though my family did live in Connecticut and it was true that I didn’t own a pair of dungarees”—eyes narrowing—“I mean jeans. My father worked fixing cars, wore coveralls at the shop and dungarees at home, but my mother dressed me like the little girls who lived in the houses she cleaned, darling boat-necked numbers with pleated skirts, pinafores, smock fronts. Not a closetful but two or three that she let out at the waist when I grew wider and at the hem when I grew longer. My mother was a good seamstress, she added bows at the back when the fashions changed, sewed in Peter Pan collars. It was my mother who bought me my first pair of gloves, told me a lady always wears gloves to drinks, to dinner. Never leave the house after four o’clock without your gloves, she told me. White gloves, and don’t let them get dirty. My mother was Italian, southern, dark, but my father was fair and I was too, didn’t look—the word then was ethnic. Thirteen or fourteen years old, I remember being in the bathroom with my mother, my mother dusting my cheeks with white powder, telling me to stay out of the sun. I played with the girls whose houses my mother cleaned, indoor games only. At least until I was eleven or twelve. Then it became unseemly.” She cleared her throat. “Once, at P.J. Clarke’s he—Norman—came up from behind and grabbed me not quite around the waist. I was wearing a mauve skirt that hit at mid-calf, tight around the hips, and a white blouse, high-necked, cap sleeves trimmed with lace, buttons down the back. In my ear he said, What would your daddy say if he could see you now, and then he laughed. Where he got the idea that my family—I mean I don’t know who, exactly, he thought my daddy was, but—Maybe he also kissed my neck but his lips were so close to my ear it could have been accidental, just”—she flicked an invisible piece of lint from her skirt—“damp brushing.” She pursed her lips. “I could look rich, that’s true, or rich enough. When I say, At first Norman liked when I showed up, I mean at first I did. Then Bill came out of the bathroom and said, Now, Norman, you know that’s my girl, and Norman pinched my ass, released me, winked. Winked at Bill, I mean. Can you hear the smile in Bill’s voice? He wanted to be hip, Norman did, and that was the problem, that was what made him so square. When I say, I barely knew who Norman was, I mean I knew him as a creep. I mean I played dumb. I was young and pretty and I hadn’t gone to college and I didn’t have artistic ambitions, wasn’t an actress or a painter or a poet, it was easy enough. The man who wrote the bestsellers, who went on television, who won prizes, accolades, the man of whom my boyfriend stood in awe. That man. Didn’t know him”—these words less said than spit—“didn’t want to.”
Now there was a pause. On the screen, the woman sipped from her drink. She fingered the pearls of her necklace. I watched the clasp mov
e, clockwise, from the nape of her neck to the base of her throat, then back around to the nape. Two circuits in, the sound of throat clearing from offscreen. “You were talking about”—a cough—“if we could maybe get back to—”
“The party, right. It was a birthday party. Roger somebody or other. Of course Bill acknowledged Norman had his eccentricities. Sure he was a little free with his hands, cheated on his wife, liked his bourbon, liked his dope, who didn’t. I liked my bourbon, didn’t I? Sure I did.” She raised her glass, took another sip, a longer sip, swallowed hard. “If you’re rich it’s not called getting drunk, it’s called having a good time. Norman had grown up poor but now he was rich and he was having a hell of a time. His last two novels, sure they’d been panned but that was because the press was against him, he was too radical, they were afraid of him but what the hell, who cared, because Norman could make your party, that’s what everybody said. He’d show up with Adele, two or three friends, drunk already, on his third or fourth party of the night, slugging from a fifth of whiskey, and he’d find the prettiest girl in the room and start a staring contest with her. Find a big guy and start thumb wrestling with him. Find a bigger guy and start head-butting him. I remember the skulls coming together, crashing, once”—she clenched her hands into fists, knocked her knuckles together—“twice, three times, four times, until someone fell down. Pick the guy up, pick himself up, start the game over. He’d clear out the living room, get down on the carpet, play bongos with his feet while waxing lyrical about, oh, marijuana or jazz or the hipster or Western literature and his place in it. The orgy as existential act. Was he better or worse than Bill Styron, than Jim Jones, than Scott Fitzgerald. Bill thumb wrestled him at a party once and the next day he couldn’t hold a pencil.” She laughed. “Once, at a party, Norman put on a record—we were back at his place, an apartment on the East Side—and it wasn’t music, it was Norman talking. Norman mid-monologue in this fake Texas accent. Someone giggled. I turned to the girl next to me and I started to say—and Norman turned to me and he said, Shut the fuck up.”
On the screen the woman leaned forward. “If anyone else were doing it, man, what a drag. But Norman, well, he was brilliant, he was a genius”—the veins on her neck visible—“you could listen to him talk all night and boy sometimes that was exactly what you did. Bill would tell me all about it on those nights when he went out to see Norman and I stayed in. He’d come home at four, high or stoned or both, puffed up with Norman, Norman, Norman. Sometimes I wondered that wasn’t the name he cried out when we were fucking.” I flinched. I think the camera operator did too, because the picture sort of wiggled. “Those nights he’d paw at me and I’d roll over so my back was to him. Some of us, I’d say, have to get up in the morning. And that was true, hell, never mind me, Bill had a job to get to too, but mostly I didn’t want Bill to touch me with the stench of Norman on him. Sometimes I turned my back, shook my head, said, Come on, Bill, and still he flipped me so I was flat on my back, pinned my shoulders. Never no, couldn’t quite figure out how to say that.” Another kind of laugh, mirthless. “And anyway, Bill couldn’t hold his liquor and the fight would tire him out and so it was only ever a few minutes. Usually he’d fall asleep with one hand stuck in my panties, the struggle to remove them having proven too exhausting, his dick only half hard.” Every word carefully enunciated. “How he thought he was going to get it in.” She shook her head, settled back into her chair. Hint of a smile. “Anyway, that’s how it usually went, easy enough, once he was snoring, to roll out from under him, take a quarter Seconal, or half, be up by seven, powder under the eyes to cover the circles.”
She shook her head again, recrossed her legs. A pause, but this time there was nothing from offscreen. “I didn’t want to go to the party but by then I’d stayed home too many nights and this wasn’t just any party it was a birthday party and not only a birthday party but also somehow connected to Norman’s mayoral campaign. He launched it, two days later, on Mike Wallace’s television show. Wallace didn’t even ask him about the stabbing, I guess he hadn’t heard the news. I read, after, that Norman invited everyone he could find, the grungier the better, druggies and drunks, punks and hustlers, his constituents he called them, said they would be the ones to vote for him, the ones he intended to represent. Like they were registered. I’ll say this, he was a good salesman. He had a nose for—scandal, maybe, or opportunity. Press. Later I read that Norman liked to surround himself with sycophants, you know, second-raters, has-beens, never-would-bes. They meant the boxers and the bullfighters, the nobody knockabouts he picked up in bars, guys who could match him drink for drink, punch for punch, and that wasn’t—I mean Bill was, like I said, a lightweight, but reading sycophants, reading second-raters, well, I thought of Bill. He was the very first person who came to mind.” She was silent for a moment, one hand touching the pearls of her necklace, the beads shifting beneath her fingers.
“It was close to midnight when we got there.” Relaxed in her armchair, her body turned away from the camera, one hand on the pearls, the other cradling the glass, almost empty. “I’d dragged my feet, done my hair and then brushed it out and then done it again, ordered two martinis at dinner, some kind of dessert liqueur. Plus the apartment was on the Upper West Side, so it took a while to get there on the IRT.” The beads of the rosary, that’s what the pearls reminded me of. “It was a big place, but glum, the walls dark green, and so packed with people, still, that to get to the bar you had to push your way through the crowd. I sent Bill for drinks and fought my way to the bathroom, crumbs and ashes on the carpet, sweet smoke in the air, an elbow in the ribs, a hand on my ass. A woman, a stranger, opened the door as I was trying the handle. She was tall, taller than me, and blond, her blunt bangs gone stringy, clinging, sweat-smeared, to her forehead. The stranger pushed past me and then I was face-to-face with Adele. Her name’s gone now, the stranger’s, but I must have known it at some point because I can remember hearing, later, that the fight started because she’d been in the bathroom with Adele, the implication being that they were”—the woman’s lip curled—“you know, making it, what you would call hooking up. She looked old, Adele did. I remember thinking she looked old. And that wasn’t just the cruelty of my youth”—smiling now, the lines that framed the corners of her face deepening—“she had aged in the six months since I’d last seen her, her eyes were small and beady, red-rimmed, swollen. I mean it was obvious what they’d been, what Adele had been doing, she’d been crying, that other rumor,” the woman scoffed, lifted her left hand from her neck so she could wave it dismissively. “Clumps of mascara in her eyelashes and black smudges on her cheekbones. She looked, for a second, less startled than afraid. Just for a moment. Then she composed herself, she smiled, and she did this—this sort of shimmy—and she said, You haven’t seen Norman, have you? I shook my head. She frowned, drained her martini glass, brought a hand to her chest, giggled. I suppose, she said, I shall have to track him down myself. Her voice rose as she pronounced myself, rose and caught. She handed me her empty glass, winked, smoothed her dress. Husbands, she said, rolling her eyes. Her cheeks were puffy and I saw, as she turned, disappeared into the crowd”—the woman’s voice was low now—“she was wearing this black velvet dress, the back cut low in a V, and as she turned I saw that above the V, the skin of her back was blushing this deep, painful-looking red. Anxiety, maybe. Embarrassment. I read, later, that the kids, two girls, were upstairs the whole time.”
The woman cleared her throat. “You know we’d all heard the rumors. The arrest in Provincetown after he’d tried to hail a cop car as if it were a cab. A drunk and disorderly charge after a dispute at some bar. The rumors and then the excuses, didn’t we know how the cops hated Norman, the real story was about a cabaret license, the cops were fascists anyway, there was no trusting them. And look”—the woman on the screen sighed—“the police did deny cabaret licenses arbitrarily, especially to black musicians, to black singers, and Norman was involved in a protest, helped circul
ate a petition, but also, separately, he got too drunk at a bar and the police were called and he was charged with a drunk and disorderly. And it’s not like that was the only time—I mean there were also those whispers about Adele’s makeup not quite covering up a black eye, a split lip, a bruise on the neck or the shoulder or the arm. The temper, the affairs. He’d shown up drunk to a lecture at Princeton, no it was Brown. He’d flown into a rage and hit his sister across the face, or was it his mother, was it his mistress. Not that I’d”—she paused, leaned toward the camera—“not that I’d ever seen anything, anything definitive. Later it turned out”—she leaned back—“or anyway I read that he’d spent that very afternoon, the afternoon of the party, drunk with a friend at an actress’s apartment, in the actress’s bedroom, the friend passed out and the actress trying to fend Norman off, Norman refusing to leave until the actress threatened to call the police. Anyway, that’s what I read.”
The woman uncrossed and recrossed her legs. She smoothed out her skirt, leaned back in her chair. “Adele provoked him. That was the line. Also that she had affairs of her own, and that is true. And not just with men, with women, threesomes. Once, at a party, she took off all her clothes and tried to start an orgy. She pulled another girl’s hair, tried to scratch her face, and this was all in public, on the sand dunes out in Provincetown, dozens of witnesses. And sure it was true but the, the shit she got for it and the shit he didn’t.” She shook her head. “Adele was known for”—lips pursed—“for her outsized appetites, for her lingerie, all Frederick’s of Hollywood, to hear the gossips tell it that woman had never owned a pair of cotton panties in her life, she was a sexual exotic. You’ll find that in the biographies, that exact phrase, sexual exotic. I know, I’ve read them. You’ll find that Adele’s mother was Spanish and her father was a Peruvian Indian and that she herself was born in Cuba. You’ll find that she was a painter, too, a talented one, but that’s introductory material, it always gets dropped quickly. Well”—she cleared her throat—“I’ve read one biography and a big chunk of another. Not that Norman wouldn’t hit a white woman, he beat his fourth wife up at least once, and not in private, and she was a blonde, she was paler than me. But the fact that she wasn’t white, that Adele wasn’t, I think it made it easier. Not for Norman to do it, but for the rest of them. For the rest of us.” She drank down what remained in her glass in one long swallow. “For me,” she said. “For me to do nothing. I hadn’t inherited my mother’s, her carnagione, her complexion, her skin tone, but I had inherited her shame about it. And I think I thought that if I said something everyone would notice that I didn’t belong. That I didn’t belong, either. And anyway the scales were always going to be tipped in Norman’s favor. I mean, it’s Norman Mailer, public intellectual, on one side, and on the other”—she waved her hand—“some bitch. Some bitch Norman happens to have married. Who even remembers the names of all of his wives, never mind the fights, the affairs, the middle-of-the-night—I mean I don’t. But the way they talked about her, before. The way they talk about her even now, in the biographies. I do think it was easier. To look away. To say she dragged her girlfriend into the bathroom to fuck, Adele never could get enough, didn’t we all know that, look at her mouth, look how it’s painted red, look at the dresses she wears, look how they’re cut. It was never the race thing outright, they always covered the race thing with the sex thing. Spread the stories around, said see, said she got what she deserved, no more, no less.”
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