At Entertainment Weekly, Ryan Coleman has pulled the best party story from Resident Punk, Legs McNeil’s new memoir (with Crispin Kott; BenBella): “Why Woody Allen ‘hid in the bathroom all night’ during a party at Norman Mailer’s house.” In April 1980, Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights guests included Shelley Winters, Kurt Vonnegut, José Torres, and the Ramones’ art director Arturo Vega — and Woody Allen, who spent the night locked in the bathroom. “People kept knocking on the door because they had to pee or do coke or whatever,” McNeil writes, “but Woody wouldn’t open the door.” When Allen finally peeked out, Vega flung the door wide — “Boy, you really are shy, aren’t you?” — and shut it on him again, in disgust.
The punks weren’t crashing the party. They were regulars. McNeil, co-founder of Punk, caught Mailer’s eye through a 1978 Village Voice piece; Mailer, readying The Executioner’s Song, saw in him the new reader he wanted. McNeil took Mailer and Norris Church to see the Ramones at CBGB — “like I was an old car and I was being taken out for a ride at 100 miles an hour,” Mailer said, “and I kind of liked it because I was really getting rid of a lot of rust” — and the long High Times interview of September 1979 followed. Soon McNeil was “a pretty regular fixture in the Mailer household,” watching Gilligan’s Island with the sons.
At fifty-seven, Mailer was still courting audiences who owed him nothing. He had spent two decades arguing that American energy lived with the hipster and the outlaw; when a generation built a scene from noise and contempt, he went down to the Bowery to hear it and invited it home. The month The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer, the country’s most combative man of letters threw open his doors while its most famous neurotic hid behind one. Jason Dee at TheMix asks why; McNeil never found out.