Saturday, November 10, 2007

The Executioner's Sort-of Song

Norman Mailer, two-fisted, ornery, and prodigiously talented, is dead at 84. I knew him, Horatio, not well, but colorfully, as he was truly a colorful man, and, more often than not, a really good writer.
I met him during the course of my flagrant and flighty success with The Pretenders, when he was running for Mayor of New York, and there was a fund raiser in the mansion of a Bryn Mawr friend of mine, a jillionaireness who was a character in the novel but too spacey to read it, so had no idea. Her husband, though, to whom I had introduced her, had been my doctor when I lived in NY, and although not too sharp medically, could read, so had read it, and said "You're a very naughty girl." But he wasn't angry, I don't think, just pleased he had seemed memorable, if somewhat silly and impotent.
I was standing on the second story of her marblelized manse, with an actual balustrade carved from the same, looking down at the party in the-- well, it wasn't quite a ballroom, but could've passed for one, certainly can in memory. Mailer was a few steps away from me, very short and thick and sputtering with bombast, in a sort of endearing way. I was being followed around town and interviewed by Marlene Nadel, a bright woman with the Village Voice, who was marking down my words and actions, thrilling to me at the time, of course, because I knew I was not just the mindless author of a sexy bestseller, but nobody else outside my immediate family which included my classmates seemed aware of that, but Marlene apparently did. It was at this point that I engaged in a verbal wrestling match with Mailer, who was having an affair with a writer friend's wife who was at the same time also having an affair with the wife of Mailer, material, rich as it was, unthinkable for me to use at the time, innocent that I really was beneath the sequins and high-level soft core, which Dr. Nahm, the philosophy professor at Bryn Mawr pronounced my work. I considered the writer whose wife it was a true friend, so put out of my mind the sexual proclivities behind their smart facades which apparently went pretty deep.
Anyway, there stood Mailer, and I engaged him. I don't remember what I said, but Marlene noted it and put it in the article-- Village Voice, 1969, I wonder if those records exist?-- but whatever it was pricked him. It was then I noted I was standing but a few feet away from the rather low balustrade, remembered that he had stabbed his wife, and that it would take but a quick swat of his muscular arm, and splat! There would go the rest of the books. So I shut up. But my feeling about him was rather tender, as I sensed a good soul beneath the bluster.
When an actual good novel I'd written, Touching, became the landmark libel case in fiction-- a very long story I have told elsewhere-- and Doubleday, having defended me all the way to the Supreme Court arguing the decision against me would have a chilling effect on fiction, once the Supremes declined to hear the case(except for Justices Brennan, Stewart and Marshall, the pro-1st amendmenters on the bench at the time)turned and sued me on the basis of the indemnification clause all writers sign holding the publisher blameless, it became necessary for me to try and get important writers to line up with me, asking Doubleday to withdraw the suit. I had to call writers I didn't know to ask for their help-- plead, really. Those calls
were made very early in the morning, as most of the writers were in the east. Besides, I didn't want my children to hear, as they were already in a state of fear and confusion that had fallen like a termiter's blue bag over our house, which we had to homestead so Doubleday couldn't take it away from us. Robert was delivering Herald-Examiners on his bicycle when I was on the front page, and thought I had committed a crime-- if you couldn't explain the First Amendment and Fiction to a jury in Santa Monica, how explain it to a ten-year-old boy? My daughter, seeing her floor being waxed, asked "Are you selling the house? Will I still be able to go to my school?"(In those ancient days, remember, people moved to the flats just so their children could be part of the Beverly Hills school system.)
So there I was, at six in the morning, calling those I admired and was intimidated by but had never even met(Truman Capote: "THat's TERRIBLE!" he mewed. "I shall call Nelson this very morning!" "Mr. Capote," I said, "thank you. But Nelson Doubleday doesn't own it anymore.") Then I called the fierce Mr. Mailer. His secretary got back to me. "You can add his name to the list, but he said for you not to do that anymore. He was a character in somebody's novel and he didn't like it."
Warm-spot-in-my-heartedly, I stepped up to see him decades later, when he and George Plimpton(another Helas!) were doing their Fitzgerald-Hemingway thing at the 92nd Street Y. By then Mailer was on two canes. I introduced myself, and did a quick summary, cutting to my gratitude at his having supported me.
"I SUPPORTED YOU!" he actually shouted, planting himself somewhat uncertainly on his feet, and lifting both canes in the air, waved them like the capricious little boy he still was, even old.
So there goes another one who was just the man you'd hoped he'd be. I am happy he got to write his last piece declaring God creative, and probably a writer, maybe not unlike Mailer himself. I hope Mailer welcomes Mailer.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Order Your Thanksgiving

I passed Whole Foods this morning on the way back from Mimi's outing, and they had a sign up that said 'Order Your Thanksgiving.' It seemed to be not what it seemed, not simply 'Sign up for your turkey,' but 'Put Everything in Order so you know what you are Thankful for.'
Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday, because I could do it up brown, and orange(pumpkin soup in a pumpkin shell) and it was the single meal for which I received unqualified praise from my family, including Robert when he was little and already a critic("Gourmet, again? Why can't we have hamburgers like every other family!") Whatever there was of the maternal in me reached full court press at that time, and the house was afloat with fabulous smells for days, besides the rigor of making home made pumpkin seeds as croutons for the soup, and the horror of cleaning up afterwards, which I tried not to think about and besides, there was Maria. I loved Thanksgiving, because it combined in me love of country, love of family, and love of beautiful colors, which are never more beautiful than in autumn, even if you live in a place where there really isn't any, but you could always find a few trees on Carmelita that shed their leaves and they changed enough so you could decorate the table.
When Don got sick I asked the doctor if he would still be with us for Thanksgiving, and the doctor, being his friend who had missed it when he might have been able to save him, more in denial than Don, said "which Thanksgiving?" but he left us on the 14th of November, coming up fast I notice out of the corner of my psyche. I made Thanksgiving anyway, with the family joined by a friend who loved him and was a little crazy, too, Susan Swanson, who went out in the backyard in between courses and came back in and said "I just had a talk with Don." In those days I believed everything, so I thought she probably had.
My life since then has been nomadic and erratic, to say the least, but anywhere I was where there was a kitchen and some orphans I could have for a sitdown, I made the glorious meal, usually with colorful plates and even more colorful food. This year I will have my grown son, still critical and contentious but basically sweet in heart, his wife-- I really like her-- Lukas, who is 7 and more argumentative than Robert was but just as bright(all Harry Potters read, the last one without moving his lips) and Silas, 4, with whom I am very much in love.
The hunger for romantic love has finally left me, the reluctant-to-let-go vestige of teenager vanished, replaced with a sense of peace because the last man for whom I thought I yearned is still good for a laugh, which turns out to be more important. But I am very frightened for my country, which I loved with a passion and poetry, both. I am putting an article from today's Times underneath my jade statue of Kwan-Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, hoping she will activate what's in the piece, and they will indict Bernie Kerik this afternoon, and that will impact on Rudy, because I am really scared. I mean scared. I think it was Will Rogers who said the Lord must have loved the ordinary man because he made so many of them. But I don't know Who loved the lunatic fringe, because there seem to be a lot of them, maybe enough to tilt the election the wrong way. I am afraid of Hillary, not because I think she will do wrong, but because I don't really believe in my heart that the country as a whole will believe her. And that Giuiliani got the endorsement of Pat Robertson is chilling. We are in an economic downslide, and that will affect everybody except the ones who have steered the ship of state onto a sandbar.
But, hey, it's Autumn, and there's one tree on Montana that sheds its leaves as they turn all the colors of Vermont, and I have collected and put them in the center of my table, underneath little pumpkins and one majestic Turban squash, with two little Teddy Bear Pilgrims, a man and a woman in appropriate attire for being grateful atop the colorful pile. And there's a cornucopia, which of course life really is, with all kinds of things falling out of it, in this case all manner of fall flowers, which there wasn't anybody on duty yesterday at Whole Foods to determine the price, so the manager made a mistake and let me have it for a song ("Keep your Sunny Side up," I think was the name of the number)
So I am, in spite of the news, really happy as Thanksgiving approaches, knowing there is much to be grateful for. I will clean up my apartment and my act, and put everything I can in order, including my cortex which the paper said today is strengthened by exercise so you don't lose memory. They told us at the Mindfulness seminar I went to at UCLA some weeks back that meditation thickens the cortex, oh at least they think it does, but it's hard to measure. Still, every once in a while, when I remember, I think of my cortex growing thicker, and that, in a way, is a kind of mediation. It beats the skin growing thick.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

A Danish in place of a Madeleine

An enormous piece of my history vanished today: coalesced from several parts of my recollection and then clocked off, wiped from the planet, and even the orb of memory. All clicked away by the death of Robert Goulet.
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"

A Danish in place of a Madeleine

An enormous piece of my history vanished today: coalesced from several parts of my recollection and then clocked off, wiped from the planet, and even the orb of memory. All clicked away by the death of Robert Goulet.
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"