On December 24, 2007, the Society posted this notice:
There will be a memorial event for Mr. Mailer, who died on November 10th, at Carnegie Hall in New York on April 9th, 2008, at four p.m. Please check this website for possible date and time changes. Carnegie Hall is located at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue.
Tickets for the general public will be available at the Carnegie Hall ticket office starting at 11 a.m. on April 9th.
Memorial Contributions
Mrs. Norris Church Mailer has designated The Norman Mailer Society for contributions in her late husband’s name. Checks made out The Norman Mailer Society should be sent to David Light, Treasurer […]. All contributions will be acknowledged.
Gifts to the Society can still be made through the Join page.
The last weeks
Mailer’s death came less than a month after the Society’s 2007 conference in Provincetown, October 11–14. That month the Society’s home page reported that his surgery in a New York hospital on October 4 had gone well and that he would be recuperating for some weeks. He and Norris Church Mailer would miss the conference, but they urged the Society to go ahead with the reception at their home on Saturday, October 13, hosted by his daughters Danielle and Maggie and his sister, Barbara (Society home page, October 2007). The members voted to send him their best wishes for a speedy recovery. On October 16 Random House published On God: An Uncommon Conversation, the last book of his lifetime: ten conversations with the Society’s president, J. Michael Lennon. Ten years later, at the 2017 business meeting, Lennon noted the coming tenth anniversary of Mailer’s death and offered memories of that conference, held while Norman was in the hospital.
November 10
The family’s announcement appeared on the Society’s site the day he died: Norman Mailer died on November 10 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, of acute renal failure, at 84. A private service and interment for family and close friends would follow, and a memorial service in New York in the coming months.
Lennon telephoned Phillip Sipiora, the editor of The Mailer Review, early that Saturday morning with the news. The calls from the press began soon after, among them a request for a live interview on the BBC that afternoon (Sipiora, “Reflections,” The Mailer Review 2, 2008). Two days later the Society posted Sipiora’s statement: Mailer was “a literary, cultural, and intellectual giant,” and what Sipiora would most remember was his character. Through November the Society’s news feed followed the tributes and notices that came after, from Publishers Weekly to the Literary Review (Mailer in the News, 2007).
The funeral was held in Provincetown. The Society’s vice president, Barry Leeds, a friend of forty years, wrote of it in a letter to the Hartford Courant published on November 13: most of Mailer’s nine children spoke at the grave, and police kept photographers away from the private ceremony. He reprinted the letter in the next Review, in “The Death of Norman Mailer; The Birth of the Norman Mailer Society,” his account of how he and John Whalen-Bridge won Mailer’s consent to a Society.
The date and the gifts
The December notice gave the Society’s members two things: the date of the public memorial and a way to give in Mailer’s name, since Norris Church Mailer had designated the Society to receive contributions. The Society’s February 2008 newsletter repeated the memorial notice. The service would be free and open to the public, with tickets picked up at the Carnegie Hall ticket office from 11 a.m. on April 9 (the newsletter placed the office at 57th and Broadway; the December notice gave the hall’s address as 57th Street and Seventh Avenue).
The same newsletter announced that the second issue of The Mailer Review, due in early September 2008, would add a section of tributes to Mailer. To pay for the added pages, the Society asked for tax-deductible contributions by May 15, 2008, and added a new category of giving: “Angel,” for gifts of $1,000 or more, alongside Sponsor and Patron.
The memorial was held at Carnegie Hall on April 9, 2008, as announced: “The Time of His Time,” produced by Norris Church Mailer, Lawrence Schiller, Carol Schneider, and Lennon, with twenty-five speakers. At its close came the announcement of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony.
Remembering Norman Mailer
On December 7, 2007, two weeks before the memorial notice, the Society had announced the theme of its 2008 conference, its sixth annual conference, again in Provincetown: “Norman Mailer: Memory and the Afterlife,” with a day of panels on “Remembering Norman Mailer.”
The conference opened that October. Its first full day, Thursday, October 16, was given to Mailer (program). In the morning Society members offered tributes of five minutes or less at the Provincetown Theater; in the afternoon the theater showed Norman Mailer: The Sanction to Write and opened its microphone to five-minute tributes from members of the community; and in the evening the Society screened the DVD of the Carnegie Hall tribute at the Provincetown Inn. The panels that followed included “Memory and the Afterlife” and “Memories and Revelations of Norman Mailer.” The program planned a reception at the Mailer home hosted by Norris Church Mailer. She could not come to Provincetown, but she opened her home to the Society again, and Barbara Wasserman and John Buffalo Mailer hosted the evening. In his letter to members afterward, Lennon named the full day of tributes at the Provincetown Theater first among the conference’s highlights (2008 conference).
The memorial issue of The Mailer Review was in members’ hands before the conference, nearly twice the size of the first; half of it was memorial material (minutes, 2008). The issue opens with the Carnegie Hall tributes and goes on to remembrances by many others who had known him, Society members among them. Sipiora called the Carnegie Hall testimonies “the cornerstone of this issue.”
In Works and Days
- Norris Church Mailer — Painter, model, and writer; Mailer’s sixth and last wife.
- 2007, Mailer’s last year, and 2008, the first after his death
- “The Time of His Time” — the Carnegie Hall statements, collected in The Mailer Review’s 2008 double issue
- Bibliography, 2008, with Barry Leeds’s “The Death of Norman Mailer; The Birth of the Norman Mailer Society”