“I tried to remember what the world-famous novelist, Norman Mailer, looked like naked,” Denham later wrote. “Norman was just square, no particular waist or pectoral definition, sturdy legs large at the knees, an ordinary penis, scared balls trying to hide.”
Their parties wouldn’t always end with such a jovial fashion show. In the waning hours of a party on November 19, 1960, Mailer drunkenly stabbed his wife in the upper abdomen and back with a penknife. After she lay bleeding for three hours, partygoers finally realized how serious her wound was and took her to a hospital. Mailer was arrested.
When he was released on bail, he went straight to his wife’s hospital bed and begged her not to press charges. He couldn’t support her and their two children if he was a convict, he pleaded. Who would want the writings of a felon? he asked her. She accepted his argument and refused to sign the felony assault complaint. Prosecutors indicted him in January, however, and Mailer pled guilty to third-degree assault two months later.
Mailer received a suspended sentence and probation; Adele separated from him later that month and they divorced two years later. “You don’t know anything about a woman until you meet her in court,” Mailer said. In total, he would be married six times.
He was, despite his flaws, a sought-after commodity on the bachelor market. “He’s a tremendously sexy man,” magazine editor Marion Magid said. “I’m part of the generation that had a crush on Mailer—like JFK in a way. He’s fascinating in spite of everything. There’s a deep sweetness in him, sort of like Sinatra—you love him anyway in spite of all the awful things he may have done.”
With nine children to his name, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Mailer was an avowed “enemy of birth control.” He frequently came head to head with feminists for his outspoken (and sometimes unpopular) opinions. Mailer once said that he doubted there would be “a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.”
But it wasn’t just women whom Mailer tangled with. He once bit off part of actor Rip Torn’s ear on a movie set after Torn, taking his role opposite Mailer a little too seriously, attacked him with a hammer in a moment of improvisation. Mailer’s wife (one of his wives, at least) had to physically separate them. Mailer also loved to mix it up with critics and took to assuming a boxing crouch upon meeting them. Still, his contemporary, Gore Vidal, said, “He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”
The highly volatile and controversial Mailer was a regular guest on television talk shows. “He could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not,” the New York Times wrote in its obituary of Mailer. Perhaps the only other literary guest of the era that talk show producers could rely on for such savory sound bites was Truman Capote (1924–1984). “I like to talk on TV about those things that aren’t worth writing about,” Capote allegedly said.
Mailer and Capote both made splashy publishing debuts in 1948, though neither looked the other up right away. “I’ve always been solitary,” Mailer said. “I’ve felt it’s bad practice for your work to join a group—what you gain in companionship you lose in the power to think independently.” Still, he was on friendly terms with Capote, and if they didn’t quite form a group, they at least made an odd couple: Mailer was in the running to challenge Ernest Hemingway for the title of Straightest Man in the World, while the flamboyant Capote had never made any attempts to hide his homosexuality.
When they went drinking together in Brooklyn Heights one night, they stopped into a working-class Irish bar where the men sitting at the bar were tough, world-weary Irishmen. “Truman was wearing a little gabardine cape,” Mailer recalled. “He strolled in looking like a beautiful little faggot prince.” Mailer walked several steps behind Capote, as if he didn’t know the man. He was worried a fight was going to break out, but the bar’s patrons ignored them.
Mailer was forever in awe of Capote’s bravery (or stupidity, as it may have been). Capote was, in Mailer’s words, “a ballsy little guy.” After Capote published the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958, Norman Mailer generously praised Capote as “the most perfect writer of my generation.”
From an early age, Capote pursued celebrity, riches, and pleasure. “I had to be successful, and I had to be successful early,” he said in 1978. “I was a very special person, and I had to have a very special life. I was not meant to work in an office or something, though I would have been successful at whatever I did. But I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I wanted to be rich and famous.”
There were clues in his early life that he was destined to be a writer. Before he even started school, the Louisiana native taught himself to read and write. He carried around a dictionary and notepad at the age of five, and started writing fiction six years later. “I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day, and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it,” he later recalled.
He also befriended a neighbor girl, Nelle Harper Lee. Both shared an interest in books. Capote cut an odd and effeminate character even as a child—his dream was to be a tap dancer—and Lee protected him from bullies. She and Capote were lifelong friends; Lee later based a character in her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, on him.
Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was a critical and commercial success upon publication in 1948. He was just twenty-three years old. Though Capote would later escape his southern roots, Other Voices owed a debt to southern gothic writers such as William Faulkner. The novel’s homosexual subject matter was mildly controversial for the 1940s, and the Library Journal warned libraries from ordering it for this reason.
The author photo on the dust jacket of Other Voices, taken a year earlier by Harold Halma, caused almost as much controversy as the book itself. In the infamous photo, Capote is reclining and staring seductively at the camera. One critic commented that Capote looked “as if he were dreamily contemplating some outrage against conventional morality.” While Capote liked to feign that the camera had caught him off-guard, he had, in fact, meticulously posed himself; the reaction from the public and the press was exactly what he intended.
Capote visited London on his book tour, where he met Cecil Beaton, a fashion photographer twenty years his elder. “I feel anxious that Truman may not survive to make old bones,” Beaton wrote at the time in a diary entry. “I am slightly scared that someone who lives so intensely may be packing in a short span more than many people are capable of enjoying or experiencing in a long lifetime.” Capote next went to France, where, if he is to be believed, he slept with his French editor—none other than the French existential novelist Albert Camus.
Capote’s undisputed masterpiece is the 1965 book In Cold Blood, a “nonfiction novel” based on the murder of a Kansas farm family. The story was originally an assignment for The New Yorker and took years to research. His old friend Harper Lee assisted him. She was instrumental to the story, because the Kansas townspeople initially gave Capote the cold shoulder. He was a strange character. He couldn’t tolerate the presence of yellow roses, “which is sad, because they’re my favorite flower,” he once said. He refused hotel rooms whose numbers added up to unlucky numbers, and he would not, under any circumstances, get onto a plane with two nuns. With Lee’s assistance, the townsfolk warmed up to Capote and his quirks.
“I got this idea of doing a really serious big work,” he said. “It would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: every word of it would be true from beginning to end.” Many wondered whether Capote was capable of telling the truth—few believed his stories about sleeping with Camus, for instance.
To celebrate the success of In Cold Blood, Capote threw a masked ball for five hundred of his “very closest friends” at the
Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966. Capote worked all summer cultivating his exclusive guest list, which included celebrities such as Frank Sinatra and actress Candice Bergen. Capote liked to brag that he made fifteen thousand enemies that night by leaving so many people off his guest list. For all the fanfare, the evening itself was pretty sedate—except for a drunk Norman Mailer, who asked Lyndon B. Johnson’s national security adviser to go outside to settle an argument about the Vietnam War.
Mailer ran for mayor of New York three years later on a platform of banning private automobiles from the city and admitting it as the fifty-first state. (He was originally going to announce his candidacy at the November 1960 party thrown with his wife at their Manhattan loft, before things got out of hand and he stabbed her.) Unsurprisingly, Mailer lost handily in the Democratic primary.
Undistracted by his foray into politics, Mailer moved right along with his publishing career. He would go on to publish more than thirty books, including The Executioner’s Song, a “nonfiction novel” about a condemned murderer. It won both the 1979 National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The book was similar in some respects to Capote’s defining work, and Capote believed that Mailer had ripped him off, causing a rift in the friendship. “We were a little chilly toward the end,” Mailer later said.
While Mailer chugged right along, Capote dilly-dallied, stretching out the fifteen minutes of fame that Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood had bought him. “He accelerated the speed of his journey to celebrity, appearing on television talk shows and, in his languid accent, which retained its Southern intonation, indulged a gift for purveying viperish wit and scandalous gossip. He continued to cultivate scores of the famous as his friends and confidants, all the while publishing little,” according to the New York Times.
Capote made a tentative foray into screenwriting, which culminated with his (unproduced) screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. “This is just like the book,” a Paramount executive who read Capote’s screenplay said. Capote replied that he was under the impression that they had asked him to adapt the book. The studio, however, remained unimpressed with Capote’s workmanlike script and wanted a more visual adaptation.
Fitzgerald was one of the few writers Capote respected. “He spoke badly of other writers,” Kurt Vonnegut said. “I assume he must have done the same about me. Almost any name I brought up he would dismiss.”
Capote was especially dismissive of the Beats. William S. Burroughs, he claimed, didn’t have an ounce of talent. He also called out Jack Kerouac during a television interview. “This isn’t writing—it’s typing,” he said of On the Road. (Capote was a fan of Gustave Flaubert and believed one needed time to find the right word.) Years later, Kerouac and Capote finally met face-to-face in a Manhattan studio taping a television program. “Hello, you queer bastard,” Kerouac said, shaking Capote’s hand. “You’ve been saying bad things about me, but I have nothing against you.”
Capote had been sitting on the title for his next novel, Answered Prayers, but the book refused to write itself. He went to at least four different psychiatrists to treat his inability to put words on the page. Nothing worked. “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it,” he allegedly said. He couldn’t bring himself to load the gun, let alone pull the trigger.
Capote finally pulled the trigger on himself, committing social suicide by publishing a series of vignettes meant for Answered Prayers in Esquire magazine in 1976. In the excerpt from his work-in-progress, he parodied many of his New York socialite friends. When someone asked if he was worried they would recognize themselves, he said, “Nah, they’re too dumb. They won’t know who they are.”
He couldn’t have been more wrong. The wealthy society friends he had been cultivating over the years quickly saw themselves in Capote’s thinly veiled caricatures, and many of them stopped speaking to him. One wealthy heiress committed suicide days before the magazine’s publication. It was rumored that she read an advance copy and couldn’t handle Capote airing her dirty laundry. “Writers don’t have to destroy their friendships with people in order to write,” William Styron said. “It seemed to me an act of willful destruction.”
Capote didn’t mind. He had new friends: cocaine, prescription pills, and alcohol.
His substance abuse further exacerbated his writer’s block. In 1978, he appeared as a frequent guest on a short-lived television game show on CBS called The Cheap Show. Capote would show up at tapings with a milk carton filled with vodka and orange juice and fall asleep in his chair, sleeping through entire episodes as the cameras rolled. No one bothered trying to wake him up. “He’s Truman. What can you do?” producer Chris Bearde said. “Do you think he’ll be brilliantly funny if I wake him up? He’ll probably tell us to all go and fuck ourselves. I’d rather have him stay asleep.”
In the early 1980s, Capote suffered from epilepsy and hallucinations, results of his substance abuse. “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely,” he said. Alan Schwartz, a friend, tried to help him dry out. Capote refused, saying, “Let me go. I want to go.”
In 1984, a month away from his sixtieth birthday, Capote died of liver cancer. Author Gore Vidal, with whom Capote had a long-running rivalry, called his death “a good career move.” Capote’s legacy totaled thirteen books, “most of them slim collections,” according to the New York Times obituary. “He failed to join the ranks of the truly great American writers because he squandered his time, talent and health on the pursuit of celebrity, riches and pleasure.”
“One’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s talent,” Mailer said. “History determines it, not the order of your words.”
In the 1980s, Mailer wed his sixth wife, former model Norris Church, and settled down. “There are two sides to Norman Mailer, and the good side has won,” his Random House editor, Jason Epstein, said of Mailer’s relatively quiet twilight years. Though his output slowed, it never stopped—he published more than thirty books in all. Curiously, he never wrote about stabbing his wife, a dark moment that forever haunted him. Mailer died in 2007 at age eighty-four of acute renal failure.
21
Freak Power
“I do not advocate the use of dangerous drugs, wild amounts of alcohol, violence and weirdness—but they’ve always worked for me.”
—HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Toward the end of the 1960s, times, as Bob Dylan sang, were a-changing. To cover these new and exciting times, a new breed of journalist emerged. These new journalists included figures who often loomed as large as the subjects they covered—both in real life and in their nonfiction.
Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and others launched a full-frontal assault on the staid profession of journalism in the pages of Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. They injected themselves into their stories, blurring the line between fact and fiction, writer and subject. And why not? The Western world was changing at a faster pace than ever before. There was a man on the moon! The world was on the brink of nuclear destruction! Mass hysteria! As Ken Kesey said, “To hell with facts! We need stories!”
Before Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) became one of the most recognizable writers of the twentieth century thanks to his signature costume (sunglasses and a cigarette holder, essentially), he was a wayward youth from Louisville, Kentucky, one of three sons being raised by a widowed librarian in relative poverty. During adolescence, Thompson had frequent run-ins with law enforcement, culminating in an arrest for underage drinking during his senior year of high school. When he should have been walking for his high school graduation, he was instead sitting in a Kentucky jail cell. It was not his first, or last, brush with the law.
Thompson learned to write by typing The Great Gatsby over and over. “Hunter identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald more than any other writer,” his biographer an
d editor, Douglas Brinkley, said. “The difference was, Fitzgerald would look in on the storefronts of the rich; Hunter wanted to smash the windows.”
After he was released from his jail stint for underage drinking, Thompson entered the U.S. Air Force. He got his first taste of publication writing for the base newspaper. He didn’t need a high school diploma; all he needed was a typewriter and the words in his own head. After he left the service, he wrote for magazines such as Rolling Stone and Harper’s, infamously riding with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang for a year and a half for a story that was expanded into a book. “In a nation of frightened dullards, there’s always a shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome,” he wrote. Although he was talking about the Hell’s Angels, he could very well have been talking about himself.
Although Thompson aspired to be a “great writer” (i.e., a novelist), he felt that if Hemingway could write journalism to pay the bills, so could he. His Fear and Loathing books, including Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, were ostensibly works of nonfiction that read like novels. Or were they novels that Thompson passed off as works of nonfiction? Any other writer would have been crucified for such flagrant abuse of the very concept of “journalism.” Thompson not only got away with it, but was celebrated for it by critics, peers, and his legions of fans.
Blurring the line between fact and fiction was only one of the many transgressions Thompson got away with. He became almost as infamous for his outrageous drug use as for his writing. “A bird flies, a fish swims, I drink,” he once said. The drugs he allegedly loaded into his convertible for one weekend in Vegas included “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyl nitrates.”
Literary Rogues Page 16