Laura Meets Jeffrey (33 page)

The history of this book

In the late 1990s, as my testosterone ebbed—which gave me some free time—I wrote the first draft of an erotic memoir. My ex-boss, sparring partner, and friend Norman Mailer loved it. His agent loved it. Most editors hated it. Some wanted it but couldn't get their editorial boards to agree. Nobody bought it. I put the book away and returned to my life making infomercials and competing on my Tennessee Walkers in cross-country equestrian events.

But two or three times every year, Norman would urge me to finish the book. He'd give me editorial advice: cut certain characters, develop the Laura arc, avoid adverbs, read it out loud and edit with a brutal knife. A month before he died he suggested two methods to make my book publishable and to have the opportunity of financial success.

The first option was to change the word “Memoir” to “Novel.”

Changing this one word, he hypothesized, would allow editors to do two things: separate my ego from the main character's, and not need to question my veracity. Norman knew I was truthful, but cautioned that others, in particular, editors, might not believe me.

The second option was to give the finished book to my ex-girlfriend Laura, the main character, and let her tell her side of the story.

During my last visit with Norman, a week before he died in November of 2007, he made me promise to finish this book.

I began rewriting when I retired in February of 2009. Norman's widow and my late friend, author Norris Mailer suggested I expand on my relationship with Laura, whom she and all the Mailers loved.

“Tell a love story,” she said. I took her advice.

A year later when my part was done, I chose Norman's second option, and Laura agreed to reveal her side of the story in a series of interviews with pop culture oral historian, Legs McNeil.

A
cknowledgments A

Thanks to Norman Mailer's family for permission to reprint parts of “The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst” from
Esquire
(1993) and his interview from
Puritan
(1981).

Thanks to Joanna Poncavage for her editorial perseverance, expertise and love.

Thanks to all the people who helped make this book better:
Norris Church Mailer, John Lotte, Paul Willistein,
Richard Luksin-Cross, Tony Cardillo, Annick Portal,
Arthur Powers, Robert Hoffman, and Jimmy Haskett.

Thanks to Professor J. Michael Lennon for his early help, his later advice, and his line-by-line copy edit.

Thanks to Legs McNeil for having faith in this project, his slash and burn editing, his interviews with Laura, the huge amount of time he donated to this project, and for not smoking in my house.

And thanks to Laura for the wild ride then
and for her courage now.
—
JM

A
cknowledgments B

Ten things I learned from Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer's 1959 book,
Advertisements For Myself,
shocked me. I read it when I was sixteen in 1963. It is a collection of essays, fiction, polemics and autobiography, unfiltered to allow him to be seen equally as genius and fool, champion and clown. It was a kind of journalism I had never encountered; a mix of objective and subjective, a search for the truth no matter where it took him. It was the first journalism I ever read where the writer was a character in the story.

In the way the quick-cut editing of Miami Vice and MTV would later change television and movies, Mailer's book changed journalism, and laid the groundwork for what would be called the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and all who followed.

Mailer's 1965 novel,
American Dream
, also grabbed me. Flawed antihero Steven Rojack is a murderer, yet the reader cares about him. He's a proto-Tony Soprano, and it's no surprise that Norman not only liked
The Sopranos
but also considered it the television equivalent of The Great American Novel.

Norman's books alone would have only made me a fan.

What raised him to hero was that he crossed over to celebrity. He was a two-fisted, bar-brawling tough guy Jewish intellectual, and the first to break the genteel mold of those like Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Norman Podhoretz and Isaac Singer. And while Arthur Miller, bless him, married Marilyn Monroe and helped to forever make Jewish intellectuals' penises more attractive to beautiful gentile blondes, Norman gave young Jews like me pride in being physical as well cerebral.

He was a cross between a longshoreman and a professor and as the military might of Israel's self-defense force in 1948, 1956 and 1967 helped wipe away some of the stigma of my tribe as sheep walking into Nazi ovens, Norman gave Jewish boys license to be fighters and thinkers, poets and warriors at the same time. It may not have seemed much to non-Jews then or to Jews today, but it was big stuff and quite liberating to me over fifty years ago.

I first met Norman when I was nineteen, in 1966.

I came to understand that his intelligence wasn't just a difference in quantity of brainpower: It was a difference in quality, a quantum change where a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind.

To explain: Put a salad plate on top of a dinner plate. The circumference of the salad plate is the limits of mental abilities of a normal person, even a brilliant one.

The larger dinner plate represents Norman. Now imagine a line running from twelve to six and another from nine to three. The twelve to six line represents kind and cruel and the nine to three line represents smart and stupid. Norman is bigger in every direction. Not only could he be smarter than you or I, he could be stupider; not only more kind but more cruel.

Norman taught me how to box, sail and rock climb, as well as how to navigate though our language from the formal to the obscene. Norman was a great buddy to hang out with who happened to be an oracle.

Here are ten things I took home from him in no particular order; some he's told many people and some maybe just me:

1. How to re-hydrate a stale bagel. Cut the bagel in half and finger paint the inside of the bagels with water and then toast normally. It works every time. I call it “
Norman Mailerizing
a bagel.”

2. Be professional. Take your job seriously. No matter what mood Norman was in, how drunk he got the night before (he stopped drinking to excess decades ago), whether he was fighting with a family member or someone else or even if he was feeling poorly, he dragged himself off to his studio and wrote if he wasn't on vacation from writing. He always showed up.

3. Do not allow self-pity. This is maybe the most useful thing he taught me. Self-pity can become an attractive melancholy comfort and you must avoid it. It's one of the worst vices because it not only keeps you from altering a situation you need to change, it's a magnet for other vices like gambling, alcohol and drugs. You can allow yourself sadness—with cause—for a certain time period but too long and/or too deep and it becomes self-pity.

4. How to make an unkempt house look clean in ten minutes. One afternoon in the summer of 1967 Norman got a phone call that someone important was stopping by in ten minutes. Norman shouted to all of us to set everything we could at right angles. It works. Squaring everything off visually makes a place look neat.

5. The best trick to making sure that what you write reads well is to speak the words out loud as you edit.

6. The most important thing in a book or movie is mood and it has to flow like a river. This is maybe the second most important thing I learned from Norman.

7. When writing, avoid adverbs, be scarce with adjectives, describe with nouns and verbs. Not so easy but I try.

8.
Good
is the enemy of
great
. I love this one. Good is so near great it makes us settle. Don't settle. Know the difference between good and great and if time and/or the money allow it—and it doesn't always—go for great.

9. How to get more comfortable in your own skin. When I was twenty-two and having a bad time after my first wife left me and went back to England I asked him how one gets more comfortable being alone. He said much of it can come from aiming for success and achieving success. You gain comfort doing the best you can.

10. Avoid the instant karma of insulting a warrior with condescension. We were in the ring boxing two three-minute rounds on the day before his fifty-ninth birthday—January 31, 1982. I was thinking about cutting him a little slack when he delivered a right that smashed me back two feet, a left jab and another punishing right cross. I growled a silent “TO HELL WITH YOU OLD MAN” and went to work. I had broken two rules of combat and deserved the beating: never insult a warrior with condescension, and when you fight, don't think.

* * *

I visited Norman in the hospital in New York City near the end but he slept the whole time. His sister Barbara was there and said it was OK to wake him but I couldn't do it.

I came back a week later. He was awake but couldn't talk with all the tubes down his throat. I didn't know what to do so I held his hand and said hello, then told him I needed the men's room. I called his wife, Norris, for guidance. She said, “He's interested in your adventures so tell him what's going on in your life. And ask him yes or no questions he can answer with a nod.”

I told him about my new horse, Pilgrim. I had him for a year but that morning was the first time I ever told him I loved him. My previous horse, Genius, the horse love of my life, had died suddenly about a year and a half before and it took me a while to fall in love with Pilgrim.

I admitted I was more promiscuous with my emotions with women than I was with horses. I'd told women I loved them either to fuck them or to make the fuck better but since there was no sex with Pilgrim because he was a horse, and more important a gelding, I found myself adhering to a higher ethical standard. Even with all the tubes I got the big Norman Mailer smile and part of a laugh. Making Norman laugh was always rewarding and up till being in the hospital he had a bellow of a laugh. He wasn't just a great performer, he was a generous audience.

I asked him if he was still Norman Mailer in his head and he rotated his hand on its axis, the international sign for “sort of.” I asked him if the doctors were optimistic and he gave me the same sign, this time slower and with a shaking back and forth of his head. He was down to 125 pounds and didn't look like he was going to get better.

A nurse came in and asked me to please leave soon so she could give Norman a respiratory treatment. She said it was OK to take a few minutes. She knew his condition and that his clock was running down.

He pantomimed like you do to a waiter when you want a check with air squiggles. I asked if he wanted pen and paper and he shook his head no. He pointed to me and motioned again and looked at me with stern eyes. I asked if he wanted
me
to write something down for him. He nodded yes, put his palms together and opened his hands like a book. I asked him if he meant my book (this book) and he pointed his finger at me with emphasis. He kept his finger stuck out and with a hint of strength jabbed it at me until I promised I'd finish it. Then he nodded his head with a smile.

I grabbed his hand and squeezed and told him that I loved him, even more than I loved my horse. He chuckled and coughed. Our relationship, as were many relationships others had with Norman, hadn't always been smooth. In the forty years we were friends there were sometimes months and years we didn't talk. But we always got back on track and it had been smooth for a decade.

With some torque still left, he squeezed my hand.

He let go and pointed his index finger at me.

Then he pointed his thumb to himself.

Then in the middle between us he made thumbs up.

“You. Me. We're OK.”

I kissed his hand. We both had tears in our eyes. He knew.
I knew. I kissed him on the cheek.

That weekend surrounded by his family he passed away. At the very end his son Stephen held his hand as he left this planet, which had benefited from his time here.

My favorite thing Norman ever said to me was a left- and right-handed compliment: “Jeffrey, you are the most improved person I ever met.”

What even his genius may not have known was how much of it was because of him.

* * *

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