Mailer by the Bay

Norman Mailer looks tremendous in San Francisco in April 1987, even if he reports an arthritic ache in one knee that he knows will never go away. He is a shining gray 64, and he is having a terrific time finishing off his new movie, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which he wrote and directed from his own novel. He says making it has been the happiest experience of his life, and he is so innocently tranquil that he’s looking foward to going to the Cannes Film Festival (an ordeal for most people), where Tough Guys will meet its first audience and Mailer will sit on the jury.
But the question doesn’t go away: not, what are you doing in San Francisco, but, what are you doing in movies, in their whirl of dreadful, diverting company? Why aren’t you staying lonely? It is a question that was first asked by Marlon Brando in Los Angeles in the latter months of 1949. Hot off the success of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer was on the coast, writing a screenplay, hobnobbing and, with that immense, brandished idealism of self he was, “trying to sell my soul, because I might have a chance to lay a movie star.”
Mailer had given a big party and Brando had come, only to leave early. Mailer stopped him on the way out and said, why go? he hadn’t met anyone. Whereupon Brando — who was, presumably, rehearsing his total quitting of Hollywood even then — turned on Mailer and asked, “What the fuck are you doing here, Mailer? You’re not a screenwriter. Why aren’t you in Vermont writing your next book?”
DT: Have you always loved movies?
NM: It’s been a grudged love, because it’s not one you can practice. You can swear your devotion, but if you’re not near it, not doing it, it’s love at long distance. One of the ironies I’ve always thought of is that when I was in college, back in 1941, I won a contest for short story writers, and on the basis of that I was encouraged to try out for an MGM young-writers competition, where they signed you to a seven-year contract. You started at $50 a week, and at the end of seven years you mere making $300 a week.
I entered this contest, and I thought I might win. And MGM asked, “What about the war?” And I said I was sure I was not going to be in the Army. I was just lying — I wanted very much to be one of the six or seven people chosen. And it occurs to me now, what would have happened if I’d got it? And had about a year in Hollywood? It might have been the fatal taste. I might have come out of the Army after the war, tried to get back in. I could have been a Hollywood scriptwriter.
DT: Do you really think that?
NM: No. But it’s a possibility.
That last answer shows the two brothers who wrestle in Mailer: the rocklike writer who knows this true calling and its brutal isolation, and accepts it, and the flighty adventurer, the advertiser, the fantasist and the desperately desirous actor who is ready to play any part. There is an uncanny and sometimes frigtening mixture of fixed integrity and recklessness in Mailer — he is in Maine and Las Vegas. The dichotomy must have scrambled, provoked and destroyed so many companions and lovers urged to be like him, to keep up with him and to be part of his daring imagination. Whereas only he seems able to take such risks and to stay so safe and strong. It is not easy to think of a man who has been part of so much damage and who is still so robust, so youthful, so far from weariness.
And I would suggest that he is here now — in movies — because he is not just a chronic actor, but a writer who has always been shaped and excited by the existential gambles all actors make when taking on fresh roles, I must add that I find him a gloriously, stubbornly bad actor; for despite all the longing to do so, he cannot tell lies comfortably or naturally. You may recall his Stanford White in Milos Foreman’s Ragtime: for all the times the director has had him say them, striving to help him relax, his few lines seem to turn the air to plastic.
But Mailer has always been into performance. He nearly played to John Garfield part in a Harvard production of Awake and Sing. Four of his wives and several of his children have been performers. His book Marilyn was not just horniness seeking to arouse and lay a dead movie start, but the most inspired evocation of majesty and disintegration in a tattered actress. For 30 years Mailer has been a regular at the Actors Studio; it’s as if no camaraderie better dissolves his writer’s paining solitude than that of actors.
And, most important, from the mid-fifties onward, and with the brilliant, intuitive challenge of Advertisements for Myself, Mailer saw the chance and the need to play himself for the world — to act out the glamor of writing and of being an author for an illiterate society, to survive and to keep pace with the discreetly overlooked modern plight, whereby character has become merely a set of roles. But it is a paradox in Mailer that he is brave enough to handle this masquerade yet so doggedly candid that he must own up to every subterfuge — and boast about it. It is a clash that might leave him loving actors but unable to direct them.
NM: I met Burt Lancaster and Harold Hecht [in 1949] in Hollywood. Burt was such a beautiful-looking man — good as he was on screen, it never photographed fully. Hecht reminds me of Larry Schiller [the promotor with whom Mailer worked on Marilyn and The Executioner’s Song]. He started as an agent, became a producer, and he wanted to do good work — wanted to raise himself in the estimate of the world, not to be seen as an opportunist and an operator. And so he thought a movie of The Naked and the Dead would be a coup. And Burt wanted to do it. But the war in Korea started, and there was no way then of making a fairly serious movie of the book.
I wanted to be around a film being made, and I thought I’d learn a lot from it. I wasn’t too optimistic that they’d do a good film. Hecht was too timorous, and the atmosphere wasn’t conducive. Whenever I’d really talk about it his face would get long and troubled. Lancaster was macho about the whole thing, leaving all the problems to Hecht. So I didn’t have a good feeling about Hollywood; on the other hand, I was absolutely fascinated by it. I thought, I’ll never write another book; I’ll be one of those people who were corrupted by Hollywood. I was scared of the history of Nathanael West, Scott Fitzgerald, all of that.
DT: Did you like L.A.?
NM: Hated it. Lived in Laurel Canyon, just above Schwab’s. Smog rose every day. You can tell I hated it from The Deer Park.
In fact, that Hollywood novel shows not just hate but uncrushable fascination: it is as if this Faust had found the temptation that really turned him on and had been granted this privilege: that for as long as he is tempted and does not touch, he will stay young and still worthy of being tempted. There is something in the style of the book that catches this illusion in Hollywood, this magical fraud — that you may waste your time there without yielding to time, without growing old. Until Marilyn, The Deer Park was the best book about the fearsome sleeping partners that dream and dread create in Hollywood. The novel is more than 30 years old; it does describe a studio power that is no longer dominant; and Mailer’s studio boss Herman Teppis, is a horrified homage to the likes of Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn. Yet nothing has changed that much. The new Hollywood tycoons are younger, healthier, with a more gracious surface — they are parts for Richard Gere now, not Rod Steiger. But they are parts, with sleek looks and deadpan lines — and very much the kind of power to pay or play that Hollywood bosses have always had.
The swagger in the dialogue and in the book’s talking to itself shows Mailer to be seldom truly alone, thinking quietly, without dreams of an audience. He is afraid of solitude, and he hectors the shadows to keep up his courage. The women in the book are not much more than sexual adjuncts (one reason Mailer’s sensibility has been suited to Hollywood), even if Lulu Meyers is an intriguing test run for Marilyn, equipped with the extra wit and smarts of a Tuesday Weld.
But what makes The Deer Park memorable is its inquiry into sexual, creative and manipulative power in its central male trio. Charles Eitel is a director with talent and a shot at something more who settles for facility, a career and talking to the House Committee on Un-American Activites. Mailer is too adroit to pin Eitel on any real moviemaker at the loss of others, but he is somewhere between Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray.
Marion Faye is a bisexual pimp, a dealer and an arranger. He’s a kid who likes to be in the desert so as to feel close to the nuclear tests and their shiver of apocalypse. The book cannot take its eyes off this snake: Faye is Mailer’s most complex and beguiling portrait of evil. And while Faye was years ahead of 1955, he has been a model for subsequent generations of Hollywood powerbrokers. There are maybe 200 people in the business today — not actors, but higher players — who could do Faye on first takes.
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the narrator, is a strapped, handsome, self-doubting fly-boy who sojourns at Desert D’Or (Palm Springs), gets to lay and marry cold sexpot Lulu and then considers selling his life story to the movies. O’Shaugnessy is the boldest stroke in The Deer Park. He is a credible and rather touching young man who also represents that larger, twentieth-century process of publicized personality of which Mailer is the most studious addict.
In the late fifties, Mailer created a stage play of The Deer Park. He lived with the play and rivaled its director, Frank Corsaro, for insights and nuances. Later, in 1967, the part of Marion Faye was played by Rip Torn, the actor with whom Mailer was to become most vitally and perilously engaged. In Maidstone, the third of three very personal movies directed and produced by Mailer, they even fought as if needing to kill each other. And I can’t help feeling that this was fueled by the way Mailer had always wanted to play Faye himself.
Maidstone was filmed in the summer of 1968, conceived in the aftermath of Robert Kennedy’s death, on a heady, doom-laden high, “when it seemed the country was getting ready to blow its separate conventions apart.” Its premise is that a great movie director, Norman T. Kingsley (played by Mailer, whose middle name is Kingsley), may run for president. The other lead character is Raoul Rey O’Houlihan, half-brother to Kingsley and his potential assassin. This was Rip Torn’s role.
Mailer gathered a strange crew for the film: actors, cameraman, wives, mistresses, boxers, gangsters, bodyguards, poets, tycoons. It was real-life melodrama that Mailer hoped might sweep over onto celluloid as a magnificent portrait of American power and dread. How? By improvisation, acting it out, making theater from rawness. Mailer wrote a brilliant essay about it, “A Course in Filmmaking,” in which he purposed the orgiastic fusion of reality and movie. It was a recipe for human disaster, yet it was founded on the insight that television had already made a stew of documentary and fiction.
DT: Beyond the Law (1968), Wild 90 (1968) and Maidstone (1970) — these were made with your own money?
NM: All. No one else put in any. I considered myself a species of pioneer. Part of me probably still believes it. I think 50 years from now a great many films will be made that way. All three were called my ego trips in that I was asserting myself as an actor. But I found you couldn’t direct such films. You have to be in the center of the action. Acting was the surest direction. If you have the strongest concept of the film — which I did — then you’ve got to be the one in the middle getting it going. I was like a host. I had a theme for the party — which I’d impart to the actors — but the party would take on a life of its own.
For those films really to work, you’d need four or five people who were in the middle of the action. On Maidstone, I tried that — surrogates. It didn’t quite work, because the others didn’t have the commitment. I’d asked Rip Torn and Harris Yulin to be the other principals. But they were professional actors and they mistrusted it. Harris was appalled. And Rip went the other way. He got madder and madder until he exploded. I think of the week we made it being like Martin Sheen’s [character’s] time in Apocalypse Now. It was the most exciting time in my life.
Maidstone is cinema verité, which is to say it is spontaneous action recorded as best the hand-held cameras can manage; yet it is ritualistic, too, as two beasts — rival actors, contending masters of the revels, warring chieftains — go at each other, hammer and teeth. The film is sloppy; the action is hideous. The danger in it is like a friend’s belch on which you can smell recently devoured human flesh. I don’t think Mailer has ever understood how deeply the film troubles some people. For it is close to those incidents from his life where the wounds were real and sometimes fatal, and when Mailer’s idealism was darkened by his triumph in making violence seem neccessary. Maidstone is not really a movie so much as an indulgence, a vented tantrum. You can say it is terrible, but you will never forget it.
In 1984, at the Telluride Film Festival, Mailer introduced a retrospective showing of Maidstone. He was still baffled and hurt that people were revolted by it. He was still so much in love with his film — the editing took two years — and with film as a whole. At the same festival, he also introduced a screening of Alain Resnais’s Providence with heartfelt reverence. Those who hated Maidstone were upset because Mailer was and is so convivial and appealing. They wanted to like him. The word was that he was “mellower” now — older, wiser, gentler and happily married to Norris Church. It seemed true and pleasing; yet it also seemed one more role, like John Garfield playing an old man.
Also at Telluride he renewed and deepened an old friendship with Tom Luddy of Zoetrope Studios, a man about to produce movies.
NM: I wanted to make a proper film before I died. It was 1985, at Cannes, that Menahem Golan [head of th Cannon Group] signed the “napkin deal” with Jean-Luc Godard to do King Lear. I had been talking to Tom about directing Tough Guys; I’d had the notion that I could do it for about $3 million. Tom didn’t say much about it at that time.
But Menahem had heard of the book. An English producer had told him he’d like to get for Nicolas Roeg. Anyway, in 1985 at Cannes, Menahem decided he wanted me to write Lear for Godard. And he announced it to the newspapers before he’d talked to too many of the principals. He told Tom, “You must get Norman Mailer for me.” Tom called and I said, “Thanks but no thanks.” I thought it would be a prodigious amount of work, a huge dollop of anxiety, and that it would never come to anything. And Tom said, “Well, what if you could also direct Tough Guys?” I remember I said, “Paris is worth a mass.”
And Menahem got on the phone and said, “Mr. Mailer, you have a two-picture contract with Cannon.” The venture with Godard went as you would expect. He came in on the Concorde a few times to discuss it. Once he had dinner with my daughter, Kate, and me and never said a word. I told her, “Well, you know, some directors are like that. They just don’t like you.” Then the next day Tom called and said he loved her. He wanted to do the picture with her. She and I were going to act in it together. And there was talk of the rest of my family being in it, too. Then we started discussing where we’d shoot it. And we thought of Maine, wonderful for Lear, with all the islands. So Godard came in, in a very black mood, and said he didn’t want to go up to Maine. Two months later he said Provincetown [Massachusetts]. He hadn’t seen it. He came to New York, to go to Provincetown. But again he didn’t want to go. Turned around and flew back. I decided I had to write something. So I did a Mafia version, Don Learo. I figured that would force his hand. It was fun to write, and I thought, let’s do it at Actors Studio.
He didn’t really like it. And he decided he wanted to shoot the film in Switzerland. The we got into trouble. Originally we were going to shoot Lear in the summer of ’86, so I’d be ready for preparing Tough Guys in the fall. But it was Labor Day before he wanted me to start shooting. So I got out there, and we just didn’t get along at all — because he had me playing Norman Mailer, and he was giving me dialogue. I objected. I said, “I’ll make up a new name, or if you want me to play me, I’ll decide what I say.” From my point of view he had me saying things that were absurd in English.
So it fell through and almost sank Tough Guys. The second ay we had a terrible fight at breakfast — half made up. He said, “Maybe it’s better if you go home.” Then he did something awful; he got on the phone to Menahem and said I was rebellious and that I’d quit. Menahem was in a fury. He said,”You want to be a director, and you won’t listen to another director?” It got very ugly. We had a four-way phone conversation: Godard, Menahem, Mailer, Luddy. I think what saved me was that at one moment, in outrage, I said, “Why, he hasn’t even read King Lear!” And Godard said, “I have no need to read it.” And Menahem sighed and said he saw we couldn’t work together. So he didn’t kill Tough Guys. I had to prove to him always that I was reliable.
And ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance was made, reliably, on schedule and on budget. It looks like a proper movie. I’m sorry to say the look is deceptive. Which brings me to the conclusion, in which I had thought I would try to urge Mailer not to be in movies: go back to those books, the few you know you have the chance at the rest of your life. I could say I think Tough Guys is a very bad film — potboiler book, muddled script, stilted dialogue, poor casting in many parts, actors who seem abandoned, a polished wintry look (by John Bailey) that never attaches to a narrative or a mood.
So what? I don’t offer that as more than an opinion, and Mailer has surely earned his escape from loneliness. Moreover, even if the picture is bad, I don’t think there is any way his books would have been so good if he were not obsessed with movies, actors, and dread atmosphere. So why shouldn’t the obsessive get to touch?
Finally, I know he wouldn’t listen or pay heed to advice — mine or anyone else’s. He has always insisted on making and living with his mistakes, and they have had an honesty that begins to explain them. It all fits with a story of the young Norman going to the movies as a teenager:
“I remember once I dragged my parents to go to the Thalia to see The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and Peter Lorre in M. And from Brooklyn to the Thalia was an hour’s journey. My father was complaining, so my mother said, “Have you no sense of adventure?”
“So he went. He was slightly deaf, and he didn’t like to read subtitles. He considered it all jolly nonsense. He leaned over to me, gloating, in the middle of one of the films, and said, ‘Now, admit it, isn’t this a dreadful film?’
“And I whispered back, ‘No, I think it’s marvelous.’
“ ‘Ah, there’s no talking to you,’ he said. And he was so mad he wouldn’t sit with Mother and me.”
When Mailer tells the story he acts out his own reply in that old Thalian dark with fresh passion. “No, I think it’s marvelous.” And you know that’s just how he will always see Tough Guys the movie — and you hope he might now retreat and write some kind of sequel to The Deer Park, a book in which the wounds could, at last, be his.
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