The Impish Iconoclast at 60

By Paul Gray

Norman Mailer looks forward to a novel of old evenings

The window of the Brooklyn Heights apartment offers a panoramic view of New York harbor, lower Manhattan and three of the best-known landmarks in the world: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. It is possible to turn 180 degrees from this spectacle and observe a fourth famous monument, the apartment's owner. Like many first glimpses of the familiar, this one offers a few surprises. At 5 ft. 8 in., Norman Mailer is a bit shorter than those who have never seen him in the flesh might expect; at 185 Ibs. he is carrying a bit more of that flesh than he would like. But his ample waist looks solid rather than soft; he is heavy in the manner of Hemingway, not Hitchcock. His bushy hair is white and cropped more conservatively than in the past, when he was the Medusa of late-night television talk shows. His eyes are clear and surprisingly blue. He moves with the grace of the boxer he has sometimes pretended to be.

Awaiting the publication of Ancient Evenings, his 23rd book and the "big" novel he has been promising for years and writing for more than a decade, Mailer seems understandably edgy. He is remarkably fit for a man of 60, which is what he became last Jan. 31. The event was celebrated quietly. Mailer and Norris Church, his sixth wife, went out to a restaurant. A few nights later, Pat Kennedy Lawford held a sit-down dinner party for several dozen people in his honor. Such subdued celebration of this milestone seems uncharacteristic. "That was calculated," he says. "I didn't want a lot of stories in January and then have the book come out three months later and everybody saying, 'Oh no, not him again.' "

It is not easy being Norman Mailer. What other writer would have to soft-pedal a birthday? He braces for the approach of his publication dates, having a pretty fair idea of how the critical articles in response will be organized: "The standard joke of this household is, 'On what page do they get to the review [see box]?' In other words, the life always comes first."

Mailer's current complaint seems a classic case of answered prayers. In Advertisements for Myself (1959) he thrust himself stage center. He became his own best subject and turned narcissism into a method of social analysis. For a heady period, no major public event in U.S. life seemed quite complete until Mailer had observed himself observing it: a huge anti-Viet Nam War march on the Pentagon (The Armies of the Night); political conventions (Miami and the Siege of Chicago); the Apollo space program (Of a Fire on the Moon). Mailer was not content simply turning out excellent books. He gave the impression that every moment he did not spend writing was given over to self-promotion. Proclaiming himself top contender for the crown of best American writer, he easily picked off the title for most interviewed. Says Buzz Farbar, a boxing, film-making and writing crony: "I used to beg him not to go to talk shows, to be more like Updike or Salinger. But Norman loves the challenge." Through such efforts he reached millions who would never read him. He became famous for being famous, a condition that the case of Zsa Zsa Gabor long ago proved irreversible. Says Mailer's agent, Scott Meredith: "Norman is the only writer in the world that you can recognize on the street."

That is slightly hyperbolic, but Mailer indisputably makes waves when he moves in public. And whatever he may say to the contrary, he does not shrink from attention. Shortly before the appearance of Ancient Evenings, he spends five days as a hard-working fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. The undergraduates who trail him through his meetings, classes, lectures and ten-hour daily schedules were not even born in 1960, when Mailer established his notoriety by stabbing his second wife Adele; they were pre-teens nine years later when he ran for mayor of New York City. They are tadpoles in the swell of his celebrity. He, ah, played Stanford White in the movie Ragtime. He had something or other to do with Gary Gilmore. "I've read a lot about him, although I've never read his works," says Freshman Susan Bernfield. "I was curious."

So is Mailer: "I want to see how much of my head is left." It has been years since he has subjected himself to such a long haul of academic rigors. At each session, he tries to sniff out potential enemies and attackers; he chiefly scents respect and even reverence. This is a fairly new phenomenon in Mailer's tempestuous performing life, and it seems to puzzle him. Early in the week, he offers to pay $5 for the rudest question he is asked. At the end, he judges none worthy of the award. Fireworks are predicted when he visits the classes of some feminist teachers. One busies herself making coffee for him.

At the lectern, Mailer proves he is still a Roman candle of ideas, spinning off sparks, noise and smoke. He gives one class his grudging approval of abortion but not birth control. "Women's contraceptive instincts become confused," he says, and spins his theory that prostitutes do not get pregnant: "When a woman has sex with five to ten different men a night, the sperm from each man is battling against the other sperm. It's the competitiveness of the sperm. They're all killing each other off."

He characteristically finds fault with the growing antinuclear movement, claiming it is dominated by pacifists: "It is one thing to stop nuclear war. It is another thing to stop war altogether. I think we don't have enough small wars. I was immensely impressed by the war in the Falklands." He suggests that countries stuck in irreconcilable disputes "rent the Falklands and fight their battles there." Mailer is asked about homosexuality, another subject on which he has been illiberally truculent: "My feeling is, and you're all going to boo at this, homosexuals want to become heterosexual... If you're homosexual, you might have to ask yourself what God thinks of you." Some of the students look pained or unhappy, but no one boos.

Back home in Brooklyn, Mailer seems bemused by such deference, somehow bruised by kid gloves. "He's liking being a celebrity less," says former Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion Jose Torres, Mailer's friend and sparring partner. "I think he's tired of the image." And the author's legends do lag well behind substantial changes that he has made in his life.

His famous financial problems are pretty much behind him. Over the past decade, he indefatigably worked himself out of a deep hole. At one time he owed heavy back taxes and $250,000 to his agent; his extravagant personal life had produced skyrocketing bills for alimony and child support. He sold off parts of his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, gradually marooning himself on its spacious fourth floor. A house in Provincetown, Mass., was sold at an Internal Revenue Service auction. He interrupted his work on Ancient Evenings to write books for quick money. One paid an unexpected dividend: The Executioner's Song, his account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Press accounts have claimed that Mailer needs to make $325,000 a year just to break even. He says he requires "slightly more." He seems to be getting that and then some. At the beginning of each month he receives a check for $30,000 from his publisher, drawn against a $4 million advance for four books: Ancient Evenings, two sequels (the first set in the future, the second in the present) and a smaller novel about contemporary America that he has already begun. Whatever it may do for or to his literary reputation, the Egyptian book has already made Mailer's economic life easier. In addition to $1.4 million from the publisher, it has pulled in some $700,000 in foreign and subsidiary rights. Mailer's other books still earn royalties, and he commands up to $15,000 for a lecture. Yet he remains sensitive to the specter of debt. The Mailer household is economically run.

It is also happily managed, without a hint of the domestic turbulence that made so many headlines during some of Mailer's earlier marriages. Friends give much of the credit for this newly found tranquillity to Norris, 34, a statuesque beauty and talented painter from Arkansas, whom Mailer met in 1975 and married five years later. Says Author E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime), who once served as Mailer's editor before his own writing career prospered: "My feeling is that since he's married Norris he's been happier than he's ever been." Torres views the success of this marriage from a slightly different angle: "The other wives had to contend with the image. Now, because he's closer with himself, he's nicer to this wife."

"It is not granted to the hipster to grow old gracefully," Mailer wrote in his middle 30s, and there certainly did not, at the time, appear to be a silver-haired patriarch in the author's future. Mailer is now a proud, picture-packing papa, ready to draw his wallet at the least provocation. The walls of the Brooklyn apartment are covered with photographs of the eight Mailer children; mixed in is an old-fashioned studio shot of little Norman, a well-scrubbed tot with jug ears and a mischievous smile. Mailer's and Norris' son, John Buffalo, 5, lives at home and basks in his father's obvious pride. The two other sons and five daughters drop by when they are in the neighborhood for visits of unpredictable lengths. The atmosphere is relaxed, bantering and full of mutual affection. Mailer's once terrible temper apparently left few scars on his children. Says Robert Lucid, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Mailer's authorized biographer: "I think he's had great success as a father. With all eight of them, you'd think he'd have a disaffected child somewhere, but he doesn't."

Mailer works against an October deadline for his next book (the "small" novel promised against his big advance) both mornings and afternoons in a "barely furnished" rented room down the block from his apartment. He is again writing fiction set in his native land and era. Ancient Evenings was his attempt to escape from the contemporary: "I wasn't sure I could really write on America any more." Attracted to Egypt originally by its burial rituals and notions of the afterlife, he found a magic in the unfamiliar: "I began to understand that these were people where everything I'd learned wasn't much help in understanding them." He estimates that he read between 50 and 100 books on his subject, but he intentionally kept his research free-form and serendipitous. He consulted no scholars: "I just never wanted to cross that bridge and go over to the museum and put myself in the hands of a curator." His liberties include the ancient Egyptians' belief in physical reincarnation and mental telepathy (they held neither tenet). One Egyptologist gives Mailer mixed marks on his homework, particularly criticizing "his cannibalized or bastardized forms of good ancient Egyptian names." Two of Mailer's main characters are named Menenhetet I and II; according to the specialist, the names should have been Mentuhotep or Amenemhat.

This controversy is only beginning, and Mailer does not seem eager to join it. He says that he finished his long investigation with the hope that his readers might be "stimulated and refreshed about America, to the point where they can see the country on their own." But the author finds his new labors no easier than they have ever been: "I've always had a hard time writing novels." A secretary types up each day's output for revision the next morning. From this spartan setting and routine, he ventures out one or two evenings a week with Norris to elegant dinner parties. Their companions on these occasions include a cross section of the rich, famous and accomplished: Gloria Vanderbilt, Oscar de la Renta, William S. Paley. The younger Mailer's well-documented interest in John F. Kennedy (they shared a year at Harvard and a passion for the presidency) has been returned by members of the clan, including Teddy, who now see and regularly socialize with the author. One of the ongoing tensions in Mailer's writings has been his inability to decide whether he should repudiate or infiltrate the Establishment. These days, he dines with it.

That could change, of course. Every inference about his future is philosophically up for grabs. "I'm an existentialist," he says, in an apartment filled with high-bourgeois comforts (books, records, paintings, comfortable furniture), surrounded by the evidence of loved ones, links to the past and hostages to fortune. He thrives on expectation. Retrospection calls up the ghosts of doubts. He wonders, when pressed to reminisce, whether he mismanaged his career, whether the success of The Naked and the Dead (1948), his first published book, turned his head toward a course at variance with his own "bent." He would not or could not pursue the slow apprenticeships of Hemingway and Faulkner. He no longer ranks himself above or takes roundhouse swings at his contemporaries. He is much more likely to praise other work than belabor it. He speaks wistfully about John Updike's orderly and largely private career: "He has great wisdom as a writer. He sets his marks properly. He just improves from book to book. On the one hand, there is nothing wild about him, and on the other there is nothing overcalculating. He has a natural sense of progression."

Despite his enormous investment of time in Ancient Evenings, its importance to him as proof that he can still deliver a punch in the late rounds of a long bout, Mailer sometimes sounds almost diffident about the novel. It too is in the past now and cannot be changed. He compares writing to loving: "If this book isn't as good as I think it is, then I've been married to the wrong woman for eleven years." He adds: "Some people will say it is a wonderful book, and other people will say, 'I can't get through it,' and that is the reception any good book gets. That happens with every book, and the returns are never final. I feel at peace about this in one funny way, which is, well, I did my best on it." And again: "What's the worst that people who are not high on me can say? 'He has talent, but he hasn't fully expressed it.' That's not such a bad place to be."

Being 60 is a place that he is still getting used to. He reveals one instance of what "getting older" means in his case: "You don't have the strength to push people around any more." At this moment, Michael Mailer, 19, handsome and muscular, is heard moving about in a nearby room. Mailer leans forward in his chair and lowers his voice conspiratorially: "I used to be able to look at that kid and he'd cower."

The moment is quintessential Mailer, combining swagger, a touch of menace, self-mockery and high good humor. Such charm in close quarters could overwhelm a roomful of enemies. How could anyone not wish this impish iconoclast happiness, prosperity, long life, enough success to make him happy and enough failure to keep him on his toes? But mellowness? Hold that for a while, spare him and the rest of the world such tedious peace. Says Mailer: "I've never been impressed by mellowing. Usually the people who have mellowed always have just a touch of sadness, because maybe they shouldn't have survived. You just can't sit there and say, 'I'm in the prime of life, isn't it wonderful. Lose 10 Ibs., I'll be better than ever.' You always have to doubt yourself. The only security I ever feel is that I won't turn pious. But that's a dangerous remark to make, because the devil's always listening."

--By Paul Gray. Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by JANICE C. SIMPSON This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.