Inaugural conference of the Norman Mailer Society, Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, November 1, 2003, 3:30 p.m. Panel 3 of 3: Jason Epstein, Lawrence Schiller, and John Taylor “Ike” Williams; J. Michael Lennon, moderator. Transcribed from the session recordings; the Society’s records hold the transcripts. Gaps the transcriber couldn’t hear are marked as they were then. Bios of the speakers are on the conference page.
Lennon: Okay, we’re going to begin the final panel called “Working with Mailer” and the panelists have all worked with Norman Mailer in one capacity or another. I think the relationships that a few of us have had with Norman have difference, markedly, although there’s a great deal of overlap. All of us have either edited Norman or worked with him interviewing or have had a variety of relationships with him that go back a number of years. But before we start, I want to mention the name of Mickey Knox’s new book which he gave us and we were trying to get flyers here but somehow the publicity operation at Nation Books was not up to the task. The name of the book is Good, the Bad, and the Dolce Vita: The Adventures of an Itinerant Actor in Tinsel Town, Paris, and Rome and that book will be coming out in 2004, in the spring. Mickey has been working on it for 5 years; it’s published by Nation Books. And we’re going to start out with Mr. Larry Schiller. Larry …
Schiller: Well, at the end of a long day, I guess I have to keep it lively and if this was at the beginning of the day, I’d say less is more. My relationship with Norman started back in the early 1970s. And it started on a blind date. Yes, I had a blind date with Norman Mailer. I had brought a book to Random House that I wanted to publish. And they had a very, very fine writer, who will remain nameless for the moment, and that’s who they wanted to put together with this book I had designed with 24 photographers about Marilyn Monroe. And, I walked out of Random House, walked out of the deal because I didn’t like the writer. I got in my hotel, I got a phone call from a gentleman I’d never heard of, Harold Roth, at a publisher I’d never heard of, Grosset and Dunlap, even though they did Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and made millions of dollars. And he invited me over to his office – he had heard I’d walked out of Random House. “Who do you want to write the book?” he said. I said, “I don’t want this writer. I want somebody who writes what he thinks – get me Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem or Roman Gary – that’s exactly what I said. And Bob Martel walked out of the office, came back an hour later and said, you have Norman Mailer. So I went out on a blind date with Norman Mailer. And we collaborated, not as a writer to a writer, but as a producer/idea man. And the first book was called Marilyn. We had our first big, big argument when I took his name off the cover of the book. I had gone to Brintano’s I think it was, right by the Plaza Hotel, if my memory’s right, and I had three covers designed. And I laid these three cover designs down – one of them had “Norman Mailer” real big; one of then had “Norman Mailer and Marilyn Monroe” and one had “Marilyn Monroe” – no Norman Mailer on the front cover. Everybody went to pick up the book without Norman Mailer’s name on it. That was our first real big argument, on our blind date. Second argument was when the Time magazine cover came out and Marilyn was in color and he was in black and white, and he said, “I’m never going to win the Nobel Prize now.” And we almost had a fist fight at the Friendship Lounge at United Airlines where Bob Martel had separated us. But seriously, it was a blind date. There were some people that interfered in our relationship, Mike [Wallace] and people like that as his biographer probably knows. But we went on and a few years later, he and I decided to have a date again. I brought him a book of pictures of graffiti. And Norman went out into art galleries and the subways and wrote a short narrative called “The Face of Graffiti.” But the Marilyn book was very, very important for one reason. When it came to first serial rights, a very major decision had to be made. And that was that Playboy wanted first serial rights. And Hefner, when he wants something, nothing stands in his way. I’d met Hefner years ago at the [unintelligible] and it went from $25,000 for first serial rights, in 1972, I think it was, to $35,000 to $50,000 to $60,000 to $75,000. And I kept on saying no. And finally, Arthur Kretchmer who became a very close friend of Norman and a friend of mine called me up and said, what’s this. And I said, “Arthur, I already have the Playboy audience in this book; I need an audience that I don’t have. I’m giving it away for nothing to Ladies Home Journal – I gave it away for $3,500. But I gave Norman half of the $75,000 because he’s a partner. So I wrote him a check for $37,500. Our relationship started that way in business; I never thought it would become creative. By the time 1976, Norman and I had finished with the fight The Thrill in Manila – I was a still photographer, basically, wanting to direct films. We were there at ringside. We sparred a little bit ourselves about the arguments we had had and this and that. When we came home, I got involved in a project in Utah which came to be known as Norman titled it The Executioner’s Song. But what happened was that on one day in Central Park after I had published with [Barry Farrell] an interview in Playboy with Gilmore and had spent about 5 months already interviewing people, I asked Norman to read some material. And he agreed to read the – to meet the subject of that material and I brought Nicole Baker to New York and we went ice skating in Central Park. And that was the day that I think irrevocably changed my life and in some ways may have changed his. That was the day he went out and bought a chess set and we went to Trader Vics at the bottom of the plaza, I remember, and we played chess. I didn’t know a damn thing about chess, and still don’t. But I never felt in Norman’s presence a weakness, an inferiority or anything. He was a rabbi to me. That’s the first word I use to describe that relationship – it started really deeply in 1977. The Executioner’s Song – every word of it is Norman’s. There – like every automobile accident, there’s lots of different views. And I’m sure Norman’s biographer and I would have different views at certain moments, but that’s what’s wonderful. The short and long of it – it started a relationship that went through many, many different reincarnations. As he grew, and I think as I grew – we reinvented ourselves at different times. We did other books together. We lived in the same apartment in Moscow. We rented apartments in Belarus, spent 9 months doing Oswald’s Tale. We started to do interviews together. There were times that I would throw him out of the room, he’d throw me out of the room. We would disagree immensely on what we were going to say to people or ask. But what I discovered was that as I was able to give Norman a foundation of material where I may have had certain patience and he did not, he used this foundation in a manner that I could never have conceived of. And he used this information to put aside his own voice, his own bravado as in Executioner’s Song and allow him to really think about what was there. There was only one other person in the United States that I felt could have every written Executioner’s Song and surely not as well, Joan Didion. He – it was remarkable and as we went on to do other projects together – Oswald’s Tale – and screenplays, I will shorten my remarks by saying The Executioner’s Song, the book, the film that Norman wrote the screenplay, and I produced and directed the film, has a very interesting little turn. And I only mention this because of what was mentioned about it before. In many instances, as I sat here today, everybody touched upon something. There were times in Norman’s life that nobody wanted. He wasn’t writing narratives. In fact the book, The Executioner’s Song, was given to Little Brown for virtually nothing. They didn’t even want the book. They didn’t’ believe in it. And we had to sell it to Howard Kominsky at Warner Paperbacks. We gave it Little Brown for $25,000, believe it or not. Because he was signed there. But, as time went on, Norman looked at every single project that he and I did together entirely different, with a fresh mind, putting everything aside. And, I think, brought an experience to it that – an experience that, I, at least myself, would not have lived if I had not had that experience. Norman brought to my projects, and I think the readers or the people watching the film, experiences they didn’t expect to have. The film “Executioner’s Song”, Norman was not the first screenwriter – very few people know that. They didn’t want him in Hollywood. Paramount wanted to do a feature and when I said Norman Mailer, they said, no. When I went to 20th, they said, no. Finally I wound up at NBC Television and they still said no. I had to go back to Norman and say, no. And we hired a very fine television screenwriter, Tracy Keenan Wynn, who had just written “The Diary of Ann Pitman”. And when that screenplay came in, I read it, very much like when I read the first book that was written on the biography on Lenny Bruce before Albert Goldman by another writer. And I read it and I said, this is not a new experience for me. All it is is taking this big book and bringing it down – I had no new experience there. I said the film has to be a new experience. So I was on my way to Yugoslavia and Norman was doing “Ragtime” with Milos Forman in London. So I sheepishly, at the hotel there, told him that I didn’t like the screenplay. And when I got back, there was a paperback version of the book laying in my mailbox. Norman had taken the paperback version of the book, torn the pages out, crossed things out, written a new line of dialogue here or there and I read the first 3 pages, and I had a new experience. The same scene Tracy Keenan Wynn had written, but what he did to it, I cannot define. But it was a new experience. Norman, I think gives everybody that opportunity to experience something they didn’t think they would have in their life. And that’s what Norman has brought to all of us and what his legacy will be. Thank you.
Lennon: Jason Epstein, will go next. Norman’s editor, longtime editor at Random House.
Epstein: Norman is unlike any other author I’ve dealt with, and I’ve dealt with many. Norman is a performer and one his acts is writing, but there are many others. In this sense, he’s rather like Lord Byron, and also like Lord Bryon, he is or was when I fist knew him, God knows 40 years ago or more, mad, bad and dangerous to know. I was a very proper young man then and only as time went by did my anarchist possibilities begin to immerge. Despite that, Norman and I became friends as people did in those days. We had much in common, we liked each other, we went to the same places, knew the same people. Of course, I admired him but I didn’t think to work with him until much later and became his editor. Norman is very easy to work with. He listens politely, he pays attention, he takes notes – and he ignores everything you say. In this respect he reminds me of Stendahl who, as some of you may know, was asked by his publisher to write a sequel to The Charterhouse of Parma. He didn’t want to do that nor did he want a discussion with his publisher on the matter, so he simply killed off all his characters in the last paragraph and made a sequel impossible. So that’s – that’s two writers Mailer can justly be compared with, Byron and Stendahl. An editor’s job is to do the most he can for his writers, try to find a narrative if the writer can’t find it himself all the time. Try to create voice. Just keep him from going off the deep end. And often it can be a pleasure and very rewarding. In some cases I find it useful to tell an author that he has to imagine himself standing on a pitcher’s mound, all by himself at Yankee Stadium with 37,000 people out there. And hold them in their seats without any props, through the length of what he’s writing. That’s what’s going to have to happen – he’s got to do this not when they’re all in the stands, but one by one if he wants to make a success of his book. And not 35,000 but many, many more. But with Mailer, an editor really isn’t much more than a valet – I would have to make sure that his trousers were pressed – figuratively, of course – his shoes were shined. A little money in his pocket before he went out. That’s really what it came down to. That, and dealing with the financial side which is again, we had very little to say about that. Norman made his own decisions that way, too. A strange character. I don’t think we ever won a contractual debate with him over anything. Say, no I want it this way so you’d better be that way. No, I’m going to have it … that was always his way. I remember that I – we talked at length about the first chapter of Harlot’s Ghost – which I thought put him in a terrible predicament – how was he going to get out of that mess. And this novel – how was he going to solve that crime, and what did it have to do with the rest of the book? But there was nothing I could do. I warned him that he would never finish that novel. And of course, he didn’t. He found a solution – he simply didn’t finish it and never had to confront the problem. I remember arguing with him at length about his book about Jesus which I thought was – certainly not to him and probably not to me either – I had no interest and like my Hebrew ancestors, I believe you don’t discuss God or even use his name as something out there, if it’s anything, and it may be nothing. I think it’s very hard to make fiction out of that. And Jesus was simply a very smart Jew at the time who got picked up by the wrong people. But, we were very far apart on that issue. But he was shrewd – he saw the beginning of this Jesus boom, I didn’t. And was right there at the birth of that. He’s good at business. I’ll be glad to answer your questions in any manner to the relationship – one an editor has with an author is confidential like the relationship of a lawyer, but we can be not too fussy about that. An editor lives vicariously through his writers, they do the work, they spend hours, months, days in the library. They take the risks. The editor’s rewards are derivative and secondary. But so are his punishments if they come to pass. For me, being an editor has been like having a personal university all my life, where I could chose my own curriculum, the books I wanted to publish and I could chose my own professors, the authors I wanted to work with and I’ve learned everything I know from them. It’s been a thrilling life. Whatever I may have contributed, Norman’s understanding is nothing compared to what he’s contributed to mine. And it’s been a joy and I’ll be glad to answer your questions on any of this after Ike has spoken to you, too. Thank you.
Williams: Jason was pretty modest. I know some changes that took place to the Jesus book because of Jason’s ideas. Norman’s told me that several times. I wasn’t going to stand but since Larry and Jason stood up, I’ll stand up, too. Hello everybody. Before we start, I just wanted to say something that maybe we hadn’t recognized and that is the role of Bob and Mike Lennon, bringing this together today – I’ve had just a marvelous time, and I hope everybody else has, too. I think Norman would love to have been here and he’d probably been a real handful if he was. I think what we’re talking about in this panel is kind of a love of the word, and actually talking about Jewish and non-Jewish, what always distinguished me about being a non-Jew in the publishing/entertainment business was how important the word was. Whether it was oral or in writing. And it defined a culture that I wanted to be part of. So, I told Jason he could call me Yitzhak, but then he told me a joke about a Chinese rabbi so I’m not going to be able to come into it, but, it’s been a world that in a sense Norman defined for many of us as you’ve heard all day long. Because of his generosity of spirit. And I don’t knew who said it – maybe you said it, Larry – but he never, he was clearly never deferential to anybody in his life except perhaps his sister or mother, but he was also very respectful of anybody who was serious about work. And he was very serious about his work. And if you were serious about your work, then you have an ability to be and have an experience that I think was unique. I always thought about Norman as a lawyer because he had a curiosity about other people’s profession. I don’t know how he felt about the editorial profession. But he was certainly enormously curious about film writing and film producing. And even if he took roles that he wasn’t necessarily equipped for, I think it was because of that enormous exploitive part of him. Maybe what he wasn’t remains an explorer, in a sense. And I think that’s what attracted Larry in Norman so much, that Larry had done things, new things that Norman didn’t. And Norman was like a sponge in many ways wanting to learn about those things. He was incredibly respectful of – you mention [Sy Rembler] with whom fought a lot, maybe that’s because they were related, but he always was interested in the law. Particularly in the law that affected both – things from pornography to First Amendment issues to libel – because he was a limit pusher and I think he’ll always be the limit pusher. And that brought him up against all parts of that –whether they were words in the early magazine articles that had to get knocked out of articles. Whether they were First Amendment issues about his strong opinions about living people and what they did or should have done. Copyright was never a problem, I don’t think the idea of Norman clipping from anybody is hard to believe. But both First Amendment and areas that frighten publishers such as pornography or really personal attacks on people of power, I think made him interested in the law in particular. You know, there’s this great joke about what’s the difference between God and a lawyer. And the answer, of course, is that God doesn’t think he’s a lawyer. And I never felt Norman thought he was a lawyer but he was very curious about being a lawyer. And I believe with Norman the most extensive and interesting one was the project that Larry brought to him in Executioner’s Song and obviously there were lots of very intimate things about loss of liberty and people and that raises issues of both defamation and invasion of privacy because private individuals have very extensive rights of privacy as opposed to writing about presidents and people in power and politics. So it was an enormous pleasure and I don’t know how many days we spent in a room doing it but it was an education for me. It was also an education about what a really good author can be as a client. Technically I worked for Little, Brown who was a very generous payer of the $25,000 advance but they were also paying my bill, too. And that’s where I first met Larry Schiller, the first time I met Norris Church – it was just a wonderful time. But it was a huge sprawling book, as Norman can tend to do. It dug into the very deepest part of people and he wasn’t afraid to open the most intimate things that he felt shaped them. And were metaphors for what shapes everybody and what shapes America, particularly in our tendency to violence and irrational behavior. It was just an enormous amount of fun. But when we come to a problem, the solution normally it’s always the lawyer says you can’t use that or the author says as – Jason, and you’re absolutely right – Michael way too modestly said that he didn’t take editorial advice. He didn’t take advice from anybody the whole time. But I found if you got into a dialogue with him, that normally resulted in both, I thought, in some instances a better book. Because my question of what is your basis for saying that about someone – because normally, you know, there’s sort of a test and if you outside corroborative evidence that this happened, you have a point of view that is overpowering, the sort of basic balance of the reportage – and it’s still reportage in a sense, although he hadn’t been there, he would rely, in many senses, on Larry’s reportage – was it balanced? Norman’s a man of enormous passion. And so I found these discussions often – I felt, and I think he did, too – let to sometimes stronger things and certainly, he was terrific about what you really couldn’t do. It wasn’t that it was a risk and we weren’t afraid of being sued. Normally, publishers do pretty well, almost 90% victories in First Amendment challenges. Courts have become fairly sympathetic unless it’s clearly an irrational, knowingly false. I think we took some risks but I think Norman went past it, would say maybe that is too intimate, maybe that’s not fair, maybe they didn’t realize that I would say that about them and it may be taking it a step further than was fair in the sense in the relationship he built up with the people. Because although he hadn’t known Gary Gilmore, he’d spent a good deal of time with the surviving people in the Gilmore family and the people who’d been affected by Gilmore’s life in and out of prison. So, I just found working with Norman – we worked on a number of books together – someone mentioned Ancient Evenings was an enormous disappointment. Ancient Evenings came into the house at Little, Brown. I didn’t work for Little, Brown but I was their outside counsel because there was no libel lead to deal with. In fairness, libel dies with you and so does rights of privacy. But I shared – was it you – somebody said Ancient Evenings was one of their favorites, and to me, if you go back and re-read up it stands up brilliantly. But between Executioner’s Song and Ancient Evenings, those two books were one of the high points I saw him just writing during that period. I happened to have liked the Jesus book myself but mainly it scenes like John the Baptist with his beard full of locusts and honey and I just thought it brought it alive and gave you a chance to think about the fact that this guy actually did live. I mean we do know he lived at one point. Anyway, I’d love to hear what everybody else has to say about this panel. Thank you.
Lennon: I had a different relationship and do have a different relationship to Norman than these 3 gentlemen. I was, I’m more of a bibliographer and an archivist and Norman would – my relationship with him was based a lot on that. Norman does not go back and look at things that he has done in the past unless he has to. He’s always forging ahead, he’s always moving ahead. And then when an idea comes up and he gets an idea about a book that he wants to do – there’s a retrospective, he doesn’t usually know where to begin. He doesn’t have copies of his own books. He gives them away. He tends to rip them up all the time. He will meet somebody in a bar and he will tell them about an essay and he will go and rip the pages out of the book and mail them to him. I remember one time, Norris tells a story about how he inscribed a book to her but he gave it away to somebody else, and she was furious. And he said, “Well, I’ll inscribe another one for you.” So he has no respect for books as objects. I revere the book as an object and I collect Mailer editions and I love them. He could care less, and he can never find them. And I think, maybe a quarter of my communication with him is “I need a copy of Narcissism because [Hans Jonosheck] is doing a piece on Arnold Schwarzenegger and he’s got to reach my piece on narcissism, what book was it in?” And I’ll tell him and he’ll say “I don’t have it, can you FedEx it to me tomorrow?” And I’ve FedExed him more books. My former secretary, Liz Adams, is in the back of the room [tape ends, then resumes on the next side] … Norman’s books and Liz would say, “I already sent you these, Norman, I already sent you these.” But he can’t find them and he wants them immediately. So there was a great impulsiveness and intensity in his writing work. Gay Talese told a story about how Norman edited the by-laws of wrote the by-laws for PEN back in the mid-80s. And he was just amazed that there was a guy doing it, sitting down with a yellow pad, writing out the by-laws of PEN. My first experience of him on that was a book called Pieces of Pontifications and I edited the interviews in there. And I spent about – at least about 6 months writing an introduction – I as a young academic, I was scared to death. I wrote this introduction. I killed myself. I tried to make it the best work I could do. And I knew it was very important. Then I went to [Pea town] and I showed it to Mailer in 1982. And he was living then at 565 and it was big house and it was filled with people. And everybody was either making coleslaw or drinking, it seemed. There were children there. His mother was there, there were friends – it was just mad. And I came in at the door with my introduction to Pontifications for him to look at it. And he read it standing right there in the kitchen and he said, shook his said and said – I said, is it that bad? And he said, well, it needs to some work. And he said, let’s work on it. And I said, where? And we couldn’t find a place in the house. We went to the second floor bathroom, he put a wicker table over the toilet, brought in two hassocks or stools and we sat down and in 45 minutes he re-wrote the whole thing. I was just dumbfounded – I’d never seen anybody – and I mean, he re-wrote it to the point that it didn’t need any more work. It was done. It was finished. And I had polished it with a file for 2 or 3 months. And I knew then that I was not only dealing with a great writer but a great editor. Jason was saying that Norman’s easy to work with, you tell him what you want, you give him your points and he listens very politely, writes them down then he forgets about them. And I agree, there’s a lot of that in there. However, what I’ve also found, and my points would usually be much more technical and background and why don’t you use this essay instead of that essay in this collection. As in the [Spooky Art ?], we did a lot of work like that from about 200 different sources. And what I found is I would give him my advice, I would fax it to him or send an email to Norris and she would give it to him and then at 10:30 at night he would call me up and want to argue about each one of the things or want more detail, so it’s an exhausting process, I found working with him. It was never-ending. I believe there is a story, and maybe Ike or Jason can say if this is true, and I can’t remember whether Norman told me or somebody else, but when Norman was delivering on the final day – Judith would know this – the final day, the final hour of Ancient Evenings, I believe he was in a cab, driving somewhere to turn in the manuscript, maybe I’ve got the wrong book – do I have the wrong book? With Norman, a book is really never done, there is no such thing as a final text. He’s very much like Henry James, who I don’t know if you know, re-wrote his brother’s letters after he was dead because he told his nephew, well, this is what William really wanted to say. And I’m working on an edition of Norman’s letters now that he wrote for “Surrounding An American Dream”. There are letters to Jason Epstein, there are letters to Mickey Knox. There are letters to Jack Aldridge, there are letters to a lot of people. There’s a copy out there on the table. And when I showed it to Norman, I knew having shown him interviews where he would change my words and change his own words, I knew that if he looked at these he would want to re-write those letters. And he hadn’t seen the letters since 1966, the last letter he wrote, and so I went out to dinner with him and I said, Norman, I’m going to give you the letters tomorrow. And he said, I want to read them, I’ve got to read them. And I said, you’ve got to remember, historically these letters exist in peoples personal collections and you can’t change these letters! And he, you know looked at me very strangely and said, yes, I agree, you’re right. And I told him the Henry James story and he chuckled over that. But, you know, he still has to look at the final version and I’m very fearful that he’s going to want to change those letters again. So the text is never complete with him. When he did The Time of Our Time, which contains, I think, 127 different items, I think only maybe a tenth of them, 20 items were hardly touched and many of them were re-written fairly extensively. Many had three sentences changed. And Norman, also when he was a young writer, tended to use “which” instead of “that” and he went through and took a lot of the “whichs” out, always improving the text all the way through. So I just want to conclude by saying it’s been a great privilege for me to work with him on several books. He’s always exhausting, he’s extremely demanding but it has been a great privilege and I’ve learned a tremendous amount about the art of editing as well as the art of life from Norman Mailer. Thank you.
Discussion
Lennon: And now I’d like to ask my colleagues up here they’d like to add any rejoinders on anything that anyone has said, and then after we’ve done that we’ll answer some questions. Who’d like to – Larry?
Schiller: You know, I have so many war stories that goes on for hours and hours and hours. Is this on, can you hear me? You know, Norman went the extra yards or miles, whatever you want to call it, in every project I ever worked with him on. He had all different roles in these projects. In some instances, I did all the interviews and give it to him. In some instances I did the work and he wrote the screenplay. There are some very touching moments which maybe I should have included but I think it’s kind of interesting to me maybe to you. One was in Belarus, one night he and I were in this apartment and he was cooking spaghetti in his undershirt and I had, I forgot, I had shorts on or something – I wear shorts when I’m working. And he looked at me and he said, you’re doing exactly the same thing as my son’s doing. And I said, what do you mean? And he looked at me again and he says, you’ve got dyslexia. And I say, no, I don’t have dyslexia. He says that’s why you always hire people like me, you’re afraid to write because you can’t spell. I said, of course, I can’t spell. The short and long of that story is, that Thanksgiving I went back and I went to a doctor and I was tested and I did have dyslexia. And I never knew it in my 50s. My own doctor told me, you were right and he jokes with me, he says, you see, 5,000 words in a thesaurus and you can do it. Two days later, and this will be the last war story, we were sitting in a sauna in Belarus with [Sherkovsky], the head of the KGB and we were still trying to convince him to give us the Oswald papers. The FBI didn’t have them, the CIA didn’t have them. And the Sherkovsky was opposite me with [the translator] on the entire project was to my right; Sherkovsky had his body guard and Norman was to my left. And I said to Sherkovsky, you give these papers to a Russian author and nobody will ever believe what’s in them. Give them to ABC and at 6 o’clock news there will be headlines, replaced by the 11 o’clock news. Give it to the New York Times and I shouldn’t have said this about the Times, tomorrow will everybody will wrap their garbage in it. But give it to Norman Mailer who is willing to come and live in Belarus for a year, who has a heart condition – whether he did or didn’t have one, I didn’t know, but I said it – was willing to come without his wife, who has a large number of children. Give it to somebody like Norman Mailer whose work is on the shelves of every single library in the world, including your own KGB library. You have a chance with these files and if he’s willing to spend this time – it takes him four or five years to write a book – how old is Mr. Mailer right now, I said. Maybe he only has three or four more books left in his life. If he’s willing to come here and do this, you should give him the files. Norman turned to me, right in the middle and said, last book I’m writing for you! And that was the last book that he actually wrote based on [the jury ?] and it was a wonderful moment because it was a collaborative effort and I’ve seen him collaborate with so many people. Everybody thinks he’s Art Aragon, the boxer or Carmen [Bisilio] when there’s a microphone in front of him, and I saw that, too. But truly there is this other side of him which has the long view and he has patience. I could see, experience that patience – maybe other people have not. I’ve experienced it immensely when he’d come to my home and we’d spend three, four days on a screenplay he had written, going over every single line, every single line, trying to figure out. I can sum all that up by very simply saying he knows how to define character with dialogue and that’s what he’s taught me. Let the dialogue define who they are.
Lennon: One thing I was going to say because people always want to know the number 2 pencil kind of stories. You know, Hemmingway had to sharpen 20 number 2 pencils before he could start work according to his interview in Paris Review. Norman’s work habits are intense and he tends to work in the morning, late morning, then have a late lunch and then go back to work again. At least in the last 10 years because this has changed over the years, he says he gets his best writing done at about 6, 7 o’clock at night. So that means you never have dinner with Mailer before 8:30 as many people know. And 9 o’clock or 9:30 is much more like it and that’s when he feels most alive. And he writes in pencil on white paper, and that white paper is then faxed to his assistant, Judith McNally, and she keystrokes it in and it goes back to Norman in chunks and batches that varies tremendously and only Judith could possibly explain that. And then he re-writes it again. And when it is all said and done, all those papers come to the Mailer Archive in Pennsylvania and it’s wonderful from an archivist’s point of view because I get the stuff that Norman has faxed to Judith and I get the stuff that Judith has faxed back to him. I usually have two or three copies of every single thing he’s every done. In bewildering form and he tends to write on every single corner of the paper, no margins at all. Then he gets done and he still writes on the side and then he has arrows and then he has things pasted on with scotch tape. He uses any materials that are at hand to get it done, he’ll write on envelopes or an apple or anything that’s before. When we were working on The Time of Our Times he used old FedEx boxes for his scheme. He had a scheme of like 27 different categories, you know, architecture, technology, existentialism and it was a huge scheme up in his attic where he writes, he had all these white FedEx boxes that Norman had written on with Magic Marker and they were all lined up on the floor and they were filled with the different excerpts that were going to go in. And I thought, that’s good, we’ve got this done. And he’d called up and said, you know, I don’t like this scheme at all. This is a lousy scheme. And I said, it’s a pretty standard scheme, it’s the writing that’s important, don’t worry about the scheme. We went back and forth and back and forth. And then he came up with a completely different idea which was to present the materials not in the order they were written over the course of his career but in the order of the events depicted. So if he wrote about something in 1980 that took place in 1920, you know, then it would go in the book as 1920 not 1980. That changed, I think, the book completely and made The Time of Our Time, at least for me, into a sort of collective novel, the kind that Dos Passos wrote when he wrote “USA” – a novel that tries to capture in narrative flow because it’s still fiction and non-fiction – all of the United States from World War II up until the late, the early 1990s. And that was his scheme – wasn’t satisfied with the scheme and I thought he was nuts to change it after such a huge amount of work. I said, what a waste – you’re killing all those FedEx boxes and start anew. But, you know, now that I look at it, I see that he was absolutely, he was absolutely correct in doing that. Yes, Carol?
Carol: Can you tell a little bit, any one of you, about[unintelligible]
Lennon: What he’s going to do next? How does he chose which book he’s going to do next?
Epstein: God only knows? He doesn’t share anything while the work is in progress.
Williams: I’ve got to say over the years that I’ve noticed two themes in what’s going to come next from Norman. One is that economic thing – he’s always behind on his bills. So, that drives part of it and the other part drives his own passion. He gets a fix on something – I think of that snapping turtle – once he gets onto it, you can’t get his jaws off it.
Epstein: He’s been at work as far as I know for 7 or 8 years on something that he won’t discuss. Any idea what that is?
Williams: Yeah, but I don’t know that we can discuss it.
Lennon: When he was working on the gospel book, The Gospel According to the Son, or as he refers to it “GAS” he wouldn’t tell me what it was and he wouldn’t tell Bob Lucid what is was. But every time we’d see him he’d say, I wish I could tell you. He thought this was so wonderful that he was going to send this book about Jesus to two Irishmen who were raised as Catholics and he’s terribly curious about Catholicism, he always has been ever since I’ve know him, and he just chortled and laughed on and on and on, and then when he did mail it to us, he called up on the phone, “have you got it yet, have you opened it, what do you think? Did you fall out of your chair that me, Norman Mailer, Brooklyn Jew, has written this book about Jesus.” He thought it was the greatest stunt that had ever been pulled and he kept it secret, not from everybody but he certainly kept it secrete from Bob and I. We had seen his books in process for many years as they went along. And I think some books he would share with, I know obviously with Judith and his wife and his sister and some of his kids, and Bob would see some and his editors would see some. And other books, he keeps completely under wraps.
Williams: You know on that, and I don’t know if both Barbara and Judith are here, but I think Norman told me once that part of it grew out of – I used to have these theological arguments with Norris’s dad who was sort of a fundamentalist Pentecostal about the old testament and how it basically was how it was, you know, that’s true, everything in it. And it caused Norman to get interested in the Old Testament then, I think he told me, once you’re there, of course, you have to move forward into the New Testament and then Jesus is kind of this bridge and he ended up there. But it all began in these arguments with his farther-in-law. Lots of you know more about this but I think that’s what he told me.
Lennon: There’s one more part to it and that he was in a hotel somewhere. He did this in, when he used to do these interviews in “At Random” with Shawn Abbott and I think it’s in there. He tells the story he’s in a hotel, London or Paris, he’s exhausted but he can’t sleep and so there’s nothing to read, absolutely nothing and of course, in the drawer is the Gideon Bible. And he said he hadn’t read the New Testament since he was a kid and he dipped into it and started reading it and he thought, you know, this isn’t very well written. [laughter] He said the parts with Jesus when Jesus is being [unintelligible] and the Sermon on the Mount and so forth, are really wonderful. But he said the rest of it is just terrible. He goes, I can think of 23 novelists who could write this better than the people who did it. And he said, you know, it’s committee prose. He said, if I can deal with – I remember he told Shawn Abbott this – he said if I can do Osiris and Ra and Seth and I can deal with Egyptian cosmology sure in hell I can deal with Christianity.
Williams: Do you think it wanted it called the King Norman Edition, or not? [laughter]
Lennon: Question? Yes, Laura.
Laura: On that topic, I was astonished at that book and also that he used the King James version [unintelligible] And there have been many fine, newer translations. I’m curious why he would use the King James version?
Lennon: I don’t know …. Finding the right voice was a concern, yes. Well, you know, in the review in the – I know Jason must have something to say about this because I know he was involved in it but I do remember in the review in The New Yorker, John Updike said and gave some praise to the book. And I know Norman was – it turned his head a bit when Updike said that the voice, the eerie biblical voice of the thing perfectly captured what Jesus might sound like if he were talking from that point in time.
Epstein: Well, I thought he did capture something of what might have been Jesus’ character. He might have done that in that book but I have problems with it otherwise. Not my favorite book. Or topic.
Lennon: Yes, Barbara?
Barbara: This is a question for Larry Schiller. I’m wondering if your interviews exist for Executioner’s Song either transcribed or on tape? Where they are?
Schiller: Every project that I have done since 1956, all the tapes, all the wire recordings, all the transcripts, everything is archived, including the technology that produced it, like the original [Yur ?] recorder that I used for the LSD interviews is archived with the wire recorders. In fact, when Norman did Oswald’s Tale, we went back and got my original interviews with Marina Oswald when I was working for Life and then Margaret Oswald when Norman ends the book with something I did in an interview in 1963. So all of my stuff is archived and I don’t know how well Norman does his, but I’ve always felt the sense of preserving what I’ve experienced as a person for other people to look at it in a manner that I don’t have the vision or the understanding to look at it. So I have preserved everything. One of the most strenuous series of interviews that Norman and I did was when we locked Marina Oswald up in 1992 or 1 in a hotel in Dallas. And she agreed for 5 days that Norman and I could interrogate here – and that was the word that was used in the understanding. And we did 3 hours in the morning, 3 hours in the afternoon and 2 hours in the evening, for 5 solid days. And we played good guy, bad guy – I was the bad guy and Norman was the good guy – so all of those tapes, the discs and some of them I think are quite extraordinary. A lot of material that Norman and I, either separately or together, let us say produced, for lack of a better word, a lot of it has not been used. It may eventually be used in other forms because it has it’s own life. Things that you don’t think are meaningful at the time to use takes on a new meaning. I used very little of my 31 hours with O.J. Simpson in jail before he was tried and eventually, when he dies and I die, that material, I’m sure, will be looked at quite differently than the 3 hours that was used out of the 31 hours.
Lennon: There are more boxes in the Mailer archive dealing with The Executioner’s Song than any other book. I think there’s 30 cubic feet of material and many, many tapes, an awful lot of the interview tapes, the ones – because Norman did interviews as well as Larry – are in that archive. Norman has got, I think, the most extensive archive, one of the most extensive archives of any living author. It’s about 500 cubic feet right now.
Schiller: He has lots of letters, I have lots of telegrams, because in the early days we sent telegrams to each other when we were arguing or fighting , we wouldn’t talk to each other. I don’t write letters so a lot of my stuff with Norman is in telephone conversations and at one point he and I agreed to record those conversations. There was a certain period of time that we felt we wanted to because I could not express myself in writing and wanted to communicate or say to him, and was able to do it a little better. He reads my hesitation and my pauses better than the words that I speak, and that’s really something.
Lennon: Yeah, Chris?
Chris: Larry, when you were doing the O.J. book was there any offers [unintelligible]
Schiller: Which O.J. book are you speaking?
Chris: American Tragedy.
Schiller: In fact this is something very, very interesting. A publisher came to me an offered us $10 million if Norman was to write the book. His agent brought that offer to me and I didn’t even have to say no on behalf of Norman because I knew how he felt about the subject, but he said no to it. But there were offers for Norman to write that book. Originally, I’d asked David [Markowitz] to write it with me but he wanted to go to work for Vanity Fair and then James Willwerth agreed to collaborate with me and write the in-trial stuff. I learned to write and Jason saved my ass on the stuff that was outside of the courtroom.
Question: I like to hear your thoughts on Mailer’s muse [rest is unintelligible]
Schiller Jose Torres has just walked in and I think if we could get Jose to talk about Norman as a rabbi and a Jew because Jose has known him for years and I think it’s important we all experience if Jose could talk about his relationship with Norman as the day winds down.
Lennon: Jose, why don’t you come right up here and speak into this mike. Jose is also someone who has worked with Norman on In the Ring and Outside the Ring.
[Sound quality of the Torres talk beginning here is quite diminished and very hard to understand, most is unintelligible]
The 2003 panels: Mailer and Magazines · Mailer and Film · Working with Mailer