User:Kamyers/sandbox

Written by
Thomas Jacomo

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Abstract: A confidant of Norman Mailer recounts his experiences with Mailer over many years.

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Note: Thomas Jacomo was a longtime friend of Norman Mailer. As executive director of the Washington Palm restaurant, he knows everyone of any importance or self-perceived importance and presides over perhaps the main, nonpartisan power meeting spot in the nation's capital.

It was around 1970 or 1971. I was running a hotel in Manchester, Vermont, called the Avalanche Motor Lodge. Nearby was a nightclub called The Roundhouse. People knew I was a big boxing fan and told me Jose Torres, the light heavyweight champion of the world, was over there. So of course I ran across the street.

I was young, full of piss and vinegar, and I ended up sparring with Torres, kidding around with him, and he says, “I want you to meet my friend Norman Mailer.” I didn't know who he was, but Jose says, “We’ve got a ring set up at Norman’s house over here. Why don’t you go a couple of rounds with him?”

So I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

Jose was hanging around with Norman, who was teaching him how to write. Jose was writing a book called Sting Like a Bee: the Muhammad Ali Story.

I go over to Norman’s house. Sure enough, he has a regular ring set up there—gloves, headgear—and I think, What am I getting myself into? Also, he outweighed me by about twenty-five pounds.

I get into the ring. Bing, bing, bing—we fought on and off for two or three weeks. We never really hurt each other. In fact, he made a rule a couple of years later that we’re never going to hurt each other, although I did give him a couple of good shots.

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Norman was a boxing fanatic. He got an offer to do the Dick Cavett Show in New York, which was a very big deal then. Norman and Jose were going to get in the ring and spar a couple of rounds on the show. I was Norman’s second and Jose had a friend of his as his second in the ring.

I’m teasing Norman, saying, “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Jose’s going to get in the ring. He’s going to see the lights, he’s going to snap and think he’s in a real fight and knock you out.”

Norman said, “Nah, nah, he won’t.”

We practice a long time in the back of my restaurant. I’m instructing him and raising my elbow to demonstrate how to block punches and I say, “Hit him here! Make it sound good!”

After all the rehearsal, we get to New York for the show and I’m in Norman’s corner. Jose throws a left hook to the body. Norman’s supposed to have his elbow over here to block it. He lifts his elbow and gets hit right in the gut. I hear the wind come out of Norman and I think, Oh my God, he’s going to fall down, right on national television!

I start yelling to Jose in Italian so no one else will know what I’m saying, “Aspetti! Piano! Piano!”—Stop! Easy! Easy! But he’s Puerto Rican, he speaks Spanish, and doesn’t know what I’m saying.

But we survived that night and went up to Gus D’Amato’s apartment to watch it on TV. And that was one of the most exciting nights Norman and I ever had.

Another time we were up in Vermont. Norman was crazy: he decides we’re going to go hiking and boating with his kids on a lake. The water’s one inch from coming into the boat and I say, “Norman, I hate to tell you this, but I can’t swim.”

“Tom,” he says, “Don’t worry. If the boat goes over, you hang onto it. I’ll rescue the kids and take them to the shore and I’ll come back and get you.” I said, “F-that! Take me back to the shore first; the kids can swim.”

*     *     *

I was a pretty hot dog skier and one day Norman tells me, “My son Michael wants to learn how to ski.” He was about seven or eight.

I said, “Okay. I’ll take the afternoon and give Michael a few lessons.” And the old joke was, Bend your knees, look out for the trees, twenty dollars, please. That was a private ski lesson up there.

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So I’m teaching Michael how to ski. He caught on pretty quickly, so I left him alone for a while to practice.

That night, Norman’s supposed to be at my house for a spaghetti dinner. I’m sitting there waiting for him . . . waiting for him . . . .

Finally the phone rings. It’s Norman. “I’m just coming back from the hospital. Michael’s just broken his leg.”

That was the end of my ski instructor career.

*     *     *

The other great story—I’d just broken up with my girlfriend and my heart was broken.

I was playing ping-pong with Norman at my hotel. He's been married six times, so I say to him, “How do you get over the hurt and the pain?” Norman says, “Tom, once you get through the flesh, down to the bone, it doesn't hurt anymore.”

I said, “Ooh, great advice, Norman. Thanks a lot.”

*     *     *

I miss a lot of things about Norman Mailer. What I miss most is his intelligence. He was the smartest man I ever spoke to in my entire life. He analyzed everything. Nothing just went by him.

Despite what a lot of people said, he wasn’t tough at all. He had a heart of gold. Any time I needed anything, he was always there for me.

And he liked to laugh. I made him laugh.

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Written by
Sue Fox

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Abstract: An interview with Norris Church Mailer discussing her relationship with Norman Mailer.

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Note: This interview took place on January 18, 2010 in the Mailer Brooklyn Heights home.

On the face of it, a twenty-six-year-old high school art teacher raised by strict Arkansas Baptists whose grandparents were sharecroppers and muleskinners, and America’s wildest literary lion—at 52, already a year older than her father-with seven children, five failed marriages and other affairs in his wake—didn’t have much going for it. But who is anyone to judge? Men and women with no obvious link in their culture, backgrounds or achievements are drawn to one another and the alchemy works. Norris Church Mailer and Norman Mailer were one of those couples. Apart from their cultural mismatch and age difference, in her platform soles, the strikingly beautiful, willowy five-foot-ten redhead, towered above Mailer, who was barely five-foot-eight.

Their love affair—painful and stormy as it sometimes was—endured until the day Mailer died—November 10, 2007. He was eighty-four. Norris, who shared the same birthday as her more famous husband, January 31, is sixty-one. As she says,

“We were together thirty-three years, which by any measure is a long marriage. Every love story has its ups and downs and we certainly had ours, but I would say it was one of the great love stories. When you think about it, the two of us were kind of impossible. Norman and his wives sounded a bit like Henry VIII. Nobody would have put our two characters in a novel and imagined that the sixth wife would be the big love story.”

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Except that, deep in her heart, Norris knew that the barrel-chested, blue-eyed Jewish intellectual heavyweight-one of the great voices of post-war American literature-loved her more than he had ever loved anyone. She writes about it in her memoir.

“Through the years, no matter the circumstances of our passions and rages, our boredoms, angers and betrayals, large and small, sex was the chord that bound us together; it was the thick wire woven from thousands of shared experiences that never broke, indeed was hardly frayed and only got stronger, no matter how the bonds of marriage were tested. Even in the worst times we had many years later, when we almost separated, somehow, inexplicably, at night we would cling to each other, drawn like powerful magnets, the familiarity of our bodies putting salve on the wounds we had inflicted during the day, until over time the warring ended and the love remained. The only thing that brought it to an end was old age, illness and death itself.”

Norris believes that she and Norman stayed together “Because we really loved each other. We loved our kids, we loved our life and we were comfortable with each other. There were dark places and Norman’s philandering hurt me. We sparred but we also laughed a lot. In the end, nothing was ever powerful enough to tear our marriage apart.”

She writes about the rude people: “and there are way too many rude people in this world asking her ‘Which wife are you?’” Never for a moment did she doubt her short although possibly not sweet answer: “The last one.”

Love him or hate him, no one ever sat on the fence when it came to Norman Mailer, perhaps the most pugnacious writer of his generation. In 1948, his first partly autobiographical novel, The Naked and The Dead, brought him fame and huge public acclaim. He was twenty-five years old. Over the next six decades, center stage, he published more than thirty books, including novels and non-fiction on subjects as disparate as Mohammed Ali and Marilyn Monroe. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize, for Armies of the Night (1968) and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979). Mailer wrote essays as well as writing, directing and occasionally, acting in low-budget movies. He helped found The Village Voice magazine. He was a regular and highly opinionated guest on TV talk shows who actively sought publicity and public attention.

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Mailer once ran for Mayor of New York. He was an anti-war protester, an opponent of women’s liberation, and a man who railed against the evils of plastic. He railed against many things and, no mean boxer, could pick a fight at the least provocation. He stabbed his second wife, Adele. Gore Vidal frequently argued with him. In 1984, Mailer wrote asking Vidal to end their feud, inviting him to help raise money for a PEN World Congress by joining an impressive list of writers including John Updike, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bill Styron, Arthur Miller, William Buckley, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer. Vidal chose to share an evening with Mailer who, throughout his life, was a great supporter of PEN. According to Norris, “He was also a great supporter of aspiring writers, replying to letters with encouraging words and sending manuscripts to agents. I used to call Norman, ‘Henry Higgins.’ He was always trying to take someone and make them into someone wonderful. He liked it when one of them succeeded and was generous with his time and advice.”

In the ICU at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, a nurse mentioned to Mailer that she liked to write. Norman told her to write about her weekend, then went through each typed page with her line by line. As Norris recounts,

“Norman used to say that if we had money he would have liked to start a school for writers. But with nine children (When she first met Mailer, Norris had been divorced for a year, and already had three-year-old Matthew. Their son John Buffalo, was born in April of 1978), money was tight. Norman worked very hard to run our enormous family—especially the time when we had six children in private school.”

One of the darkest times in the Mailer marriage was when Jack Abbott came into their lives. Norman was writing a book (The Executioner’s Song) about a murderer, Gary Gilmore, who was executed in 1977. Jack Henry Abbot wrote to Mailer from prison. He had a history of violence and had killed an inmate. His letter was well written, useful for the book, and they began corresponding. Mailer told Abbott that he thought the correspondence would make an interesting book and his publisher took on the project. Then Abbott was granted parole. Norris had no idea that Norman had committed himself to helping Abbott until the night he announced that he was off to pick him up from the airport and bring him home to dinner.

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According to Norris, “John Buffalo was not yet three. It was a scary time. The most scary thing was Norman’s lapse of realism. He genuinely thought [that] talent would override everything—that with his book—Jack would be transformed. But a psychopath, even one who has written a decent book, is still a psychopath. That was Norman—idealist and optimist who woke up to a new world every day.”

In May 2007, I went to see Mailer in Provincetown. It was six months before he died. Physically frail, he was combative and thrilling company. I told him that I had once worked in Cuba with a photographer to find Gregory Fuentes who had known Ernest Hemingway and was featured in his novel The Old Man and The Sea. Norman was amused to hear that we found Fuentes who, wheelchair bound, was wheeled out for tourists by his grandson. Just like Mailer, Fuentes had his life etched into his face. For $5 we could kiss Fuentes and take a photograph. As I left, “I joked to Norman, I’m going to kiss you good bye but I’m not giving you $5!” At eighty-four, in his old man’s slippers, he didn’t argue. I left, haunted by what he had said about writing. “A novel is like falling in love. You don’t say, “I’m going to fall in love. It has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.”

And love is what I came to talk about with Norris in the lovely Brooklyn brownstone house that has long been the Mailer’s New York home. The apartment is up three flights of stairs. You huff and puff your way up flights to be rewarded by the sight of her striking portrait of Humphrey Bogart hanging jokily outside the entrance.

Inside, on a clear blue sky day such as this, your breath is taken away by the view from the huge living room windows over the East River to Wall Street straight ahead. Slightly to the West is the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty. Norris has filled her home with books. It’s an Aladdin's cave of objects and memories. There are festive music boxes—a carousel, a circus tent and an enchanting Ferris wheel that lights up. Her home is an oasis of calm green walls and different textures—of stencilled furniture, plumped up velvet cushions, walls and surfaces covered with family photographs and paintings—some of hers—others done by Mailer children. The apartment is a celebration of her love for family and home. It radiates Norris’s artist’s gift for colour and delicious sense of humor. When you’re in her company, it is hard not to smile. She recounts, “I’m anally tidy. But it wasn’t always like this. When I first came to New York, this place was such a mess. I scrubbed it clean, and didn’t give it a thought. There were ropes and trapezes for the