Mailer remembered
Books and authors
AN icon is many things to many people, but you don't usually see all of it in one place. During the memorial for Norman Mailer at New York's Carnegie Hall last week, I met an actor, director and licensed tour guide named Noel Young, who wondered whether Rip Torn would be there. Young said he met Mailer a couple of times in the 1960s and 1970s, "back in the bad old days." There was the time at the Village Gate when the novelist was running for mayor. "He kept swigging out of a bottle of Jack Daniels," Young remembered. "Managed to insult everyone there." And then he met Mailer once at the loft the author shared with boxer José Torres and actor Torn.
I'd seen the YouTube clip of the Mailer-Torn fight during the filming of the 1970 movie "Maidstone," which Mailer wrote and directed. And I, too, was a little sorry that Torn's name was not on the program for the memorial. But the lineup of speakers and performers was impressive: William Kennedy, Tina Brown, Sean Penn, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Muhammad Ali's wife, Lonnie. Charlie Rose was the emcee. It's a truism that everyone in the media is smaller than you expect, but Rose was taller than I'd imagined. He stooped slightly as he singled out Mailer's widow, Norris Church, who stood and blew a kiss.
Watching the people below in the red cushioned seats, I thought -- with the kind of nostalgia you can have only for something you have not experienced -- of another public gathering that took place nearly 40 years earlier.
On April 30, 1971, the Theater for Ideas sponsored a panel at New York's Town Hall called "A Dialogue on Women's Liberation." It featured Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Jacqueline Ceballos and Diana Trilling. Mailer, who had recently published "The Prisoner of Sex" in Harper's Magazine, moderated -- after a fashion. "I will try to wield some limp sort of gavel," he told the excitable audience. Luckily, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus recorded the whole messy night for posterity in the film "Town Bloody Hall."
Those were the days when hecklers heckled. At the microphone, Johnston praised "the lesberated woman/the gay gay gayness of being gay." Mailer cut her off for going over the allotted time. Then, two women crashed the stage to make out with Johnston. Trilling took a more restrained approach, although she did declare her hope that "we can all have such orgasms in our individual complexities as we happen to be capable of."
