Norman Mailer 1923 - 2007

Hiram Haydn, editor: Pugnacious

Back when Norman Mailer was submitting "The Deer Park" simultaneously to a number of publishers, after Rinehart had backed out of their contract, we [Random House] turned it down. I was primarily responsible for our decision. Yet he insisted on blaming and ridiculing Bennett [Cerf], whom he kept referring to as "Sally Cerf."

Soon thereafter all three of us attended a party at the [William] Styrons' in Roxbury, Connecticut. Mailer was his most pugnacious self that night. Throughout dinner he kept goading Cerf with "aspersions" on his manhood. He challenged him to "step outside." Finally, to everyone's astonishment, totally ignoring the twenty-five years' difference in their ages, Bennett marched to the front door and went into the yard. Norman did not follow; he contented himself with ridicule. (New York, mid-1950s)

From "Words & Faces," by Hiram Haydn (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974)

Jay Landesman, dramatist, producer and publisher: Amongst sycophants

Norman Mailer came to town promoting a new book. We went back to the days in the mid-1950s when he first became interested in hipsters and Beats, a piece of research that led to his famous essay on the White Hipster. Told that I was one of the originals on the Beat scene, he was extremely accessible when we got together. In London, we met up at his publisher's party. Andre Deutsch had rounded up the usual suspects: critics, columnists, PRs, Sonia Orwell and Jonathan Miller. Surrounded by a crowd of sycophants, Mailer looked so self-satisfied in his three-piece Savile Row suit I felt it was my duty to dirty him up a little bit. Unable to get anywhere near him, I slipped the joint that would do the deed to Deutsch instead. "For Norman," I whispered, "he'll probably need it about now." Instead of thanking me, Deutsch grew quite upset. "He doesn't do that any more," he hissed ...

At dinner at our house, and later in his speech at the Mayfair Theatre, Mailer's view of America confirmed that we'd left [the U.S.] just in time. "Fucking has become a matter of status in America," he told a contentious audience. "The civil rights movement will never solve anything. As long as people see themselves as a minority, there is no hope for them. The matter will be decided by an increase in violence ... Modern man is becoming schizophrenic, caught in a double bind, between the dream that the culture tries to sell him and the realities of life." (New York, mid-1950s; London, 1965)

From "Jaywalking," by Jay Landesman (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992)

Norman Podhoretz, magazine editor: Cultural radical

It was at Lillian's [Hellman's] home ... that I first met another famous fellow traveler of old, Norman Mailer ...

In the eight years since I had last seen him [speaking at a Progressive Party rally], Mailer had moved away from Stalinism .. .he had gone over to the species of Trotskyism (reflected in his second novel, "Barbary Shore") ... he soon lost faith in Marxism altogether. But here he diverged into a track of his own ... Mailer in giving up on revolutionary socialism proclaimed himself the leader of a new revolution: a cultural rather than a political revolution, a revolution that would "move backward toward being and the secrets of human energy" instead of forward toward the struggle for control over a more and more highly industrialized world. In his own eyes, in other words, he was still a radical -- indeed more of one than ever before. (New York, 1956)

From "Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir," by Norman Podhoretz (Harper & Row, 1979)

Mike Wallace, broadcast journalist: Papa for president

Norman Mailer ... deigned to grace Night Beat with his presence. Mailer was then known primarily as a novelist. He had only just begun to branch out into the kind of highly charged, intensely personal journalism that would become his literary forte in the sixties and seventies. Nor had he yet developed his outsize television persona -- part guru, part buffoon -- that would make him, variously, an object of mirth, admiration and wonder in later years. But there is no doubt that when he appeared on Night Beat he was starting to move in that direction.

The big hero in Mailer's life at that time was Ernest Hemingway. In fact, he had proposed in a newspaper article that Hemingway run for President because "this country could stand a man for President since for all too many years our lives have been guided by men to were essentially women." Needless to say, I referred to the article in our interview:

WALLACE: What do you mean by that -- men who were essentially women? Who among our leaders is so unmasculine that you regard him in that light?

MAILER: Well, I think President Eisenhower is a bit of a woman. (New York, 1957)

From "Close Encounters: Mike Wallace's Own Story," by Mike Wallace and Gary Paul Gates (William Morrow, 1984)

Alfred Kazin, literary critic: Cancer theory

Mailer has me to lunch at the Oak Room in the Plaza. Norman can be studiously correct and most polite when he is not pursuing his favorite demons. But even here at the Plaza he is trying, with a missionary's sweet earnestness, to persuade me that cancer is produced by sexual repression. Cancer or no cancer, there is a fashion show going on in the Oak Room, and the models dip and circle most deliciously as they parade their sexy dresses around our table. Norman, utterly absorbed and intent on persuading me, never looks up for a moment. (New York, late 1950s)

From "A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment," by Alfred Kazin (HarperCollins, 1996)

Paul Krassner, satirist: Spelling and doing

When Norman Mailer wrote his first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," he used the euphemism "fug" for "fuck". At our first encounter in [Exposé editor] Lyle Stuart's office, I asked Mailer if it was true that when he met actress Tallulah Bankhead she had said, "So you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell fuck." With a twinkle in his eye, he told me that he had replied, "Yes, and you're the young woman who doesn't know how to." ... (New York, 1960)

From "Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut," by Paul Krassner (Simon & Schuster, 1993)

Willie Morris, magazine editor: Well-mannered

I first met him in Austin in '61...The novelist Barbara Probst and her husband Harold Solomon, New York intellectual exiles at the University of Texas, gave a party for him after a lecture, and he ended at Celia's and my house for nightcaps. I saw little in that initial encounter of his reputation as a veritable Coriolanus of the city pavements. Quite the contrary. He was gracious, witty, well-mannered, and for one who had grown up among Jewish Southern boys with their sunny and expansive countenances, and deep abiding drawls, a rather nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn: short, blue-eyed, with outsized ears and an abundant crown of wiry hair. Beyond the hair and ears he had a strong, almost suffering, Jewish face, Old Testament somehow to me in its lines and contours in repose. Was it not true that he built model airplanes all through high school? ...

From "New York Days," by Willie Morris (Little Brown, 1993)

Ved Mehta, New Yorker staff writer: Pugilistic challenge

...to a party given by a New York woman who liked to entertain a lot of literati...the writer Norman Mailer and his girlfriend (later his third wife), Lady Jeanne Campbell, arrived....

The hostess brought Mailer and Lady Jeanne around, and introduced my friend to them. "You must have read Mr. Mailer's famous book 'The Naked and the Dead,'" she said.

I expected Mailer to lash out. I knew he got angry if only his first book was mentioned, as if to imply that his later books were not as good. Also, he seemed the kind of writer who thought his name alone was sufficient introduction. But he put on a gallant face.

"I'm very happy to meet you, sir," my friend said. "I've not read your book, but now that I've met you I most certainly will."

Mailer simply turned away abruptly.

I, however, was leery of Mailer still, and rightly so, for later on, without any provocation, he came back to me, thrust a fist in my face, and called me an impostor. "You are faking being blind," he said. I thought he was referring to the visual elements in my writing, but then realized from something he said that he was talking about the way I got around. I tried to move away, but he challenged me to a boxing match outside. "If you don't come out and fight with me, you will show yourself to be a coward," he said. Luckily for me, Lady Jeanne intervened. (early 1960s)

From "Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker," by Ved Mehta (The Overlook Press, 1998)

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