The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 He said he was working on another novel but didn’t want to talk about it.
+The past year he’d mostly been writing screenplays for money. He had six kids in school and had to pay the bills. Every month he met with his accountant and was “$10,000 down or $10,000 up.” That’s also why he spoke at Florida. He was working on Godard’s adaptation of ''King Lear'' (which was eventually made, but not a good film). Mailer spoke admiringly of Kurosawa’s ''Ran'', an adaptation of ''Macbeth''. He was also researching the life of Jewish racketeer Meyer Lansky for a possible film.
+By strange coincidence, Joshua Weinstein, the student assigned to chaperone Mailer at UF, said he was a nephew of Lansky. Mailer prompted him for details about “Uncle Meyer” Lansky as family man. It was interesting to observe Mailer’s journalistic technique: he was looking to confirm observations about Lansky’s character he’d gleaned elsewhere.
+After the reception, Mailer and I went to Bennigan’s restaurant and bar with some students and journalists. He had refrained from eating or drinking before his talk, wanting to arrive onstage in peak condition. Now he ordered a hamburger and a drink called a “Rum Presbyterian” a concoction he instructed them how to blend. His mood was genial. The chef was so excited at making a hamburger for Norman Mailer that he asked for his autograph on a napkin. The author complied.
+As Mailer drank, he began to unbend and talked freely in response to the students’ questions. I was impressed by his graciousness, his candor, and his curiosity. He was willing to engage with the students, so long as they spoke about subjects that interested him. The conversation ranged from his recent trip to Russia, to his screenplays, boxing, flying, rock climbing, and journalism.
+He said he had studied Russian for several months but gave up because he couldn’t speak it and was having trouble with the Cyrillic alphabet: “I couldn’t visualize the sound of the words.” This suggested to me that his imagination is highly visual, or that he has to find a link between the audio and the visual.
+Mailer said he liked the Russians: “They are deeper than Americans. I thought they all looked Jewish.” He met and admired the poet Yevtushenko and twice viewed a movie Yevtushenko had made. I said Russian poets were like rock stars or opera singers; Mailer agreed.
+He said that the American government had been lying to us about Russia throughout the Cold War to exaggerate the threat. He found Russia in 1985 not to be a great power but a sad place, a Third World country, like the United States if it had been devastated by war and then run by the Army. He called it more “an Army state” then a police state: “In the Army, everyone gets drunk as a way of saying, ‘I don’t give a shit about your institution.’” That, he claimed, accounts for the appalling rate of alcoholism in Russia.
+Talk shifted to boxing: the fraternities at the University of Florida had recently held a “Slugfest” of amateur boxing. Mailer was fascinated; he wanted to know the details about the weight classes and the time of the rounds. He said, “If these guys are going in the ring for the first time, they must be terrified.” The students said this was generally true. He talked about boxers psyching themselves up for weeks before a fight, and the pressure and terror with which they lived.
+Aging and death seemed to be on Mailer’s mind. He discussed upcoming fighters and mentioned the death of trainer Cus D’Amato. Mailer said he gave up boxing in 1985: “My knees gave out. If you can’t jog, you can’t box.” He had last seen Muhammad Ali in 1984 and said that, despite Parkinson’s disease, Ali’s mind was in much better shape than that of many alcoholics. Ali joked with Mailer’s wife: “You still with that old man?”
+The topic switched to skydiving. Mailer said he once flew a glider but didn’t like it: too noisy, you had to concentrate on the instruments, and he got nauseated. Some students at a college he visited had once invited him skydiving. He was terrified all night at the prospect and relieved the next morning when it rained and they couldn’t go up. I admired Mailer’s honesty about his fears and incapacities, something he confronts in all his fiction. The terror he said boxers lived with was deeply familiar to Mailer.
+I asked him about the scene of climbing the monument in Provincetown in his novel ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1984). He said it was based on his experience of rock climbing and on the experience of a guy who actually climbed the monument. We began to mentally cast the film ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', which Mailer was about to direct. For Timothy Madden, I suggested William Hurt; Mailer said his name had been mentioned (the part was finally played by Ryan O’Neal). The part of Regency was tougher to cast. Mailer said there weren’t many big, tough guys who could act. I mentioned Brian Dennehy (Wings Hauser ended up playing Regency). Then I described in detail to Mailer the plot of the Coen brothers’ film ''Blood Simple'' (1985), a murder thriller I had recently seen. Mailer was momentarily taken aback, saying, “Jesus! That plot is better than mine.” He was dissatisfied with the ending of ''Tough Guys Don't Dance'' but didn’t yet know how to change it. (''Tough Guys Don't Dance'' [1987] had its moments, but it failed at the box office and became Mailer’s first and last try at directing a Hollywood film. He was right: ''Blood Simple'' was a better thriller.)
+Because I’d never boxed or gone skydiving or rock climbing, I talked about running with the bulls in Pamplona, which I had done in 1974. I said the real danger of running was not so much from the bulls but from fellow runners who tripped or stumbled, causing a human pileup or montón. Then many people could be gored or trampled by the bulls or the steers. Mailer said, “What a humiliating way to go: trampled by a steer!” I said, “To the guy getting trampled, it would make no difference which animal killed him.” But Mailer was concerned about dying a noble death.
+A student journalist asked him if journalism was good training for a writer. Mailer said, “No, journalism is a whorehouse.” I disagreed, citing Twain, Crane, Dreiser, and Hemingway. But Mailer would not change his mind. The student journalists were disappointed.
+Finally, Joshua Weinstein demonstrated a drinking trick with a straw; he claimed Florida Governor Bob Graham had taught it to him. It involved twisting and compressing the drinking straw, then popping it with a fingernail. It went off like a pistol shot. Mailer was game but couldn’t make it work.
+On the way back, we drove past Graham Pond on campus where, one evening in 1975, Mailer had given a speech outdoors that had been heckled by the students. I pointed out that right across the street was the campus sewage plant. Mailer said, “The sewers must have been rumbling the night I gave that speech.” So, he had not come to the University of Florida just for the money. He could have gone to many campuses, but he was trying to make up for what he perceived as his failure of eleven years before. And he seemed satisfied, if not with the bland reception to his speech that evening in 1986, then with his conversation with the students at the bar.
+I drove him back to the Hilton. Mailer asked the time; it was 11:45 pm. “Omigosh, I’ve got to call my wife!” And he excused himself to use the phone.
+I thought to myself: this is wife number six. I figured she would also be his last.