Laura Meets Jeffrey (13 page)

I got to their place and May Pang let me in. I sat down at the kitchen table and waited. Waiting was another annoying regularity. After fifteen minutes John walked by and said, “Hello, Jeffrey. Would you like some granola?”

“Yes, I'd love some.”

“Help yourself,” he said as he took out a bowl, milk and a box of granola for me.

John had offered me granola as soon as he saw me ever since our second meeting when he gave me some of his specially made granola and I glommed down two bowls of it. It was the best granola I ever had and I told him (and I was straight, for I would never go to their place or Apple's office stoned—this was business). Even once when we ran into each other on the street he asked me if I wanted some granola.

John grabbed a chocolate brownie and a chunk of chocolate. He was a fiend for anything chocolate and was working his way though a giant five-pound Hershey bar. He headed back to the bedroom and said he and Yoko would be out in a minute. We were meeting to go over the artwork for the ad campaign for David Peel's “The Pope Smokes Dope,” an album John was producing.

I was eating granola when Yoko came running out annoyed and excited, pointed to me and asked, “Are you the washing machine repairman?”

“No. Sorry, Yoko.”

She zipped back into the bedroom.

John and Yoko came out about thirty minutes later. During our meeting the real washing machine repairman showed up. I was focused on the work and Yoko's insult was fading. Then John quickly stood up to answer the phone. It hit me. I had to say something.

“Yoko, I love working for you and John and you people are not only my heroes, but how I make much of my living and you are great clients and I only have one request.”

“Yes,” she said, trailing the ending of the word the way people do to show mild disbelief or disgust.

“Yoko, you never remember my name or who I am. I'm Jeffrey Michelson and I'm not the washing machine repairman. I do your advertising and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it hurts that you don't remember me.”

“Well. John and I are so busy and meet so many people.”

“John remembers my name.”

“Well. Okay, I'll try.”

“Thanks, Yoko. That's all I ask. It's Jeffrey Michelson.”

She repeated it. I'd never heard it said with a Japanese accent.

* * *

A few weeks later I was leaving the Hammock Store on Bleeker Street where an informal gathering of local arty types including writers and painters and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn would come stoned and hang out on many a late afternoon. We lounged in a variety of Yucatan hammocks and had, if not the most insightful and clever salon in the West Village, then surely the most comfortable.

As I stepped out the door, I saw John and Yoko across the street. Our eyes met. I waved, John waved and Yoko looked puzzled but I could tell she was trying to remember. I yelled out. “That's okay, Yoko. It's me, the washing machine repairman.”

I don't know whether John said something to her or she remembered, but finally she said, “Hello, Jeffrey,” and I smiled.

My strongest recollections about John Lennon are not the often overly long advertising and design meetings but the breaks for bathroom and food. More than once John picked up his guitar and went into the opening riff of “Day Tripper,” which he loved to play. Once he picked up his guitar and did a great flashy loud Elvis imitation—voice, wiggling pelvis, throbbing leg, and all. May Pang, Yoko, a few other assistants and I were rolling in laughter as he exaggerated each move, each note, each Elvisy gesture.

Another favorite memory was the night Steckler invited me to the Record Factory recording studio to see John, Yoko and Phil Spector mix “Happy Christmas (War is Over).” Andrea came with me and to our surprise when we got there we were escorted into a big studio with lots of other people, old, young, black and white. We were going to be the chorus. We practiced until we all had the melody and timing and then we all sang several takes for the final recording. If you listen closely you can hear me singing “War is over if you want it.”

My relationships with the other Beatles were limited. I never met Paul and in three and a half years my entire connection with him was earning $18.75 for changing the catalog number on an ad for him.

I met Ringo a few times and he was as charming and happy-faced as you might imagine. The first time was at Apple's office on the forty-first floor at 53rd and Broadway. I walked into a meeting room to give something to Allan Steckler, and Apple staffer Paul Mozian, who hung out with Ringo, introduced us. They were all eating lunch and Ringo, a vegetarian, without prompting, offered me half his cheese submarine sandwich.

George I had a bit more to do with and we met enough times that he remembered my name. I learned two life-altering lessons from George.

I was sitting in Steckler's office listening to acetates of the final mix of George's new solo album,
All Things Must Pass
. Tears had come to my eyes on side one during “My Sweet Lord.” Most songs blew me away, especially “Wah Wah,” “Isn't It a Pity,” “What Is Life,” and his cover of “If Not for You.” I was listening to song one side four, “
I Dig Love,” and George walked in. It's a heavy lightweight song with one of Ringo's best performances. The arrangement is simple, sparse and stunning, my favorite kind. George said hello and asked me, as if my opinion mattered, what I thought of the album. I told him it was brilliant. He asked, “Really?”

“Yes George, it's bloody brill,” I replied parodying English slang. I asked, “Don't you know it's great? It's great. Not like I think it's great, like I know it's great.”

“Thanks, Jeffrey. That means much to me.”

Steckler walked in and I left while they did some business. George left and I went back into Steck's office. He lit up a Pall Mall and I lit up a Marlboro. It seems alien now but that was what people did then.

“George is really insecure today,” said Allan. “Beyond normal pre-album release jitters. George feels bad because he had to hire someone to write out the charts so he could copyright the music and the sheet music. He feels bad because he doesn't know how to read or write music.”

Two things hit me. If George Harrison, one of the top earners in the music industry was insecure, then there was no hope for me. And probably not for you either. Fuck, he was a Beatle! How much more approval did someone need? Second, if he was that great and still insecure, then insecurity just doesn't matter. It won't stop you from being great, so just keep moving forward no matter how scared you are. I can't say I never had any more insecurity. I have it right now as I'm writing this book. But it doesn't matter.

What does matter is putting your best effort into whatever you're doing. It doesn't insure greatness but it's almost always a prerequisite. That was the lesson I learned at Apple. Everybody, Bob Gruen, May Pang, Paul Mozian, and the people I introduced to Apple, Michael Gross, Tina Rossner and Toby Mamis, all gave all they had every day. We left it all on the field and took nothing back to the locker room.

In addition to charging $15 an hour for design and making 7.5 percent of the ad budget, I would do odd chores for John, Yoko and Allan. I'd research photos, pick up something and courier it if that was the most expedient method and because I lived right around the corner from John and Yoko, I'd be asked to make Xerox copies (nobody had a machine at home in 1971) or find three dozen red balloons or whatever else inspired John and/or Yoko that moment. Allan asked me how much I would charge for doing these odd jobs, figuring it would be less than my design fee. I told him $15 an hour because there were sixty minutes in every hour I worked for him no matter what I did. He laughed and agreed.

Allan Steckler, who at one point in his life was the Creative Director for the Beatles and the Stones at the same time, set the bar high. One day Allan gave me the assignment to listen to all the tapes kids sent to Apple Records so the Beatles could sign them. There were hundreds of tapes and no one had listened to any of them in years. Allan said it wasn't right to just throw them out without them being heard. He told me that if I thought the tape was good, he didn't care about it. If it was GREAT, he still didn't care about it. If it knocked me out, he'd listen to it for ten seconds. Out of hundreds only three knocked me out and none knocked Allan out.

My favorite John Lennon/Orgy/Money story of them all happened when John and Yoko appeared on the Dick Cavett Show to plug their new single, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” that had created an uproar in both the black and white communities.

California Congressman Ron Dellums, who is black, wrote a defense of John's language, “
If you define ‘niggers' as someone whose lifestyle is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society are defined by others, then Good News! You don't have to be black to be a ‘nigger' in this society. Most of the people in America are ‘niggers'
.”

I was asked to create a response ad to John's critics using Dellum's quote. I set the quote in the largest type possible and covered the entire page with a small attribution at the very bottom.

That night, I was at a giant orgy on 57th Street with about twenty couples. At 11:30 p.m., I left the designated wall-to-wall mattress orgy room and went into the living room to turn on the TV to the Dick Cavett show. John and Yoko were performing the song with Elephant's Memory, their back-up band. They'd asked Allan Steckler to be there to mix the sound and I wanted to watch and hear them. With Steckler at the knobs, it was the best live TV sound I ever heard.

I sat on the carpet real close to the TV and didn't have the sound up very high. Two naked girls came over during the performance to watch. I was smack in the middle so one sat on one side and one on the other. One of them was lanky with long, wavy reddish brown soft hair. I'd already had her earlier in the evening and really enjoyed myself. She was a moaner with a beautiful melody.

The other was tiny and adorable, the smallest girl I'd ever seen at an orgy, well under five feet, perfectly proportioned with an ass I could definitely hold in one hand. She might have been a tall midget because she had perfect proportion but I think she was just a small person. I don't know where the line is drawn.

She was bubbly, had a high-pitched but not unattractive voice and although I hadn't yet had her, she'd been a popular attraction. I'd watched her fuck and suck and desired her for the obvious erotic and perverted reasons. Her name was Noreen and the reason I remember was when she first introduced herself I thought she said fluorine and I wondered why anyone would name their baby girl for the ninth element on the Periodic Chart.

Both said they were Beatles fans and were excited to see John and Yoko on television. After the end of the song during the commercial I told them John and Yoko were my clients. They were very impressed. The little one started stroking my balls.

After the break, John and Yoko joined Dick Cavett to talk about the controversy. John held up my ad with Congressman Dellums' quote, the camera pushed in really tight, and John read it word for word. My ad was full-frame on the tube being seen by millions of people. I screamed, “That's my ad!” Anyone who wasn't in the middle of sex came out to the living room, including the guy who lived there to make sure we weren't getting cum stains on the carpet. I repeated, “That's my ad that John's holding up!”

Andrea came in and proudly confirmed to everyone that I really did do John and Yoko's advertising and everyone congratulated me. Noreen, who had been fondling me dove into my lap and started sucking away and I had the first inkling of what having sex with an underage groupie must be like.

When the show segment ended, I turned off the TV and with lanky-girl on one arm and cute-tiny on the other, I took my now hardened prong into the authorized orgy room. The adorable little girl, with matching tight small vagina, was a wiggly screamer and looked into my eyes with groupie adoration. Just to make sure that this was going to be fantasy perversion instead of felony perversion I asked her age. To my surprise she said twenty-six, older than me.

Noreen was so small that it was hard to get my penis all the way inside and I don't think I could have if I'd been any larger. We couldn't easily kiss and fuck at the same time. What the fuck lacked in choreography it made up for in visuals. Lanky-girl rubbed me and played with my balls as I came. If I could have been arrested for my thoughts I would have been. Like so many times before or since.

I was a kind of mini-celeb, on par with a particularly handsome man with a huge cock. Several other girls were now more interested in me than they were before, and I obliged. My cock was absolutely hard and seemed to me to be at least two inches bigger than the one I came to the party with. Ego! What a drug!

And a tip of the hat to John Lennon. He might have affected many people in many different ways, but I'm sure I'm on the short list of those whose penis got bigger because of him. Brian Epstein not withstanding.

20

Puritan
interview with Norman Mailer

December 28,
1980

Our John Lennon Assassination Funk doesn't substantially dissipate till ten days later when Laura and I start prepping for our interview with Norman Mailer for
Puritan
magazine.

After negotiating for a year, Norman comes to an agreement with one of John Krasner's sons, now the publisher. Norman will take two weeks to prepare for the interview, give the interview and then spend his and his secretary's time editing the transcripts of the tapes. He will be paid $10,000, which is a huge amount for the publisher of a porn magazine to part with, and less than Norman usually makes for the same amount of time.

Having Mailer in
Puritan
will be bragging rights to influence other interviewees, a strengthening of a legal defense in case we are ever busted, and good publicity. The first and third reasons work out well, and we never had to test the second.

To prepare for the interview, Laura and I work with
Puritan
editor Stanley Bernstein four days a week for six or seven hours a day for two weeks. We take it seriously. We want it to be great. We read more than thirty previous Mailer interviews and cut down a list of 200 or so questions to a manageable list of less than fifty.

Laura and I interview Norman in the dining room of his home in Brooklyn Heights on December 28, 1980. Norman's apartment, (a maisonette, as the English would call it because it is the largest apartment in the building and has two or more floors), is the top three floors of an elegant Brownstone overlooking the water just south of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The space has a nautical motif and the second floor is accessible only by climbing a ship's ladder and the very top floor has a room that can only be reached by walking a plank. A few different times in my life I lived in his apartment, sometimes for a few months, most notably in the summer of 1969 after Tisha left me.

Norman had just published
The Executioner's Song
and
Of Women and Their Elegance
about Marilyn Monroe. Being interviewed in a hard-core sex magazine between photos, even lovely ones, of fucking and sucking, with his recent high visibility was particularly bold and against much advice from his personal and business circle.

Norman said this interview was one of his three or four best out of 500 or more. He chose it for re-publication in
Pieces and Pontifications.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the interview, with remembrances from Laura:

JEFFREY
Michelson
: What do you think makes for great sex?

NORMAN MAILER: Great sex is apocalyptic. There is no such thing as great sex unless you have an apocalyptic moment. William Burroughs once changed the course of American literature with one sentence. He said, “I see God in my asshole in the flashbulb of orgasm.” Now that was one incredible sentence because it came at the end of the Eisenhower period, printed around 1959 in
Big Table
in Chicago. I remember reading it and thinking, I can't believe I just read those words. I can't tell you the number of taboos it violated. First of all, you weren't supposed to connect God with sex. Second of all, you never spoke of the asshole, certainly not in relation to sex. If you did, you were the lowest form of pervert. Third of all, there was obvious homosexuality in the remark. In those days nobody was accustomed to seeing that in print. And fourth, there was an ugly technological edge—why'd he have to bring in flashbulbs? Was that the nature of his orgasm? It was the first time anybody had ever spoken about the inner nature of the orgasm.

“The day of the Norman Mailer interview was my twenty-eighth birthday,” Laura remembers, “and Jeffrey and I had rolled around in passionate sex too long that morning, as usual—and then it was a rush to curl my hair, put on my makeup and get ready. We were in Manhattan and had to get to Brooklyn Heights, I think it was snowing—so we had to rush to get there on time.

“I was excited about doing the Norman Mailer interview,” Laura recalls, “I mean, I'd met him already, a couple of times, and I liked Norman a lot. He made me feel sexy. He always gave me this dirty little grin that just made me feel like he would be good in bed...”

JM: When does a graphic representation of a sexual act become art, and when, smut? Can you suggest any criteria on which to base a judgment?

NM: Let me ask you: what would be your idea of smut?

JM: Things that are particularly degrading to either sex.

NM: Get specific.

JM: I guess it's stuff that turns me on in a way I think I shouldn't be turned on.

NM: Excellent.

LAURA
Bradley
: I feel the difference is if it's commercially and sloppily done just to get another page in the book, then the insult is to the art. Where it's a true and honest representation of feeling, then no matter what it represents, it's got to be respected.

NM: Mmm, that's very well put too. You would be saying in effect then, Laura, that smut is the equivalent of a sexual act that's casual, what we call sordid, no love, no real pleasure in it, a cohabitation with a rancid smell to it. So a lack of respect for the seriousness of the occasion when a photographer takes a picture of a woman in a pornographic position makes for smut. Jeffrey is saying, as I gather, that there are certain acts that tend toward the bestial, the fecal (I assume these are the sort of things you're thinking of) that may be arousing, but you find that your moral nature disapproves.

JM: I'm wondering: Is smut to pornography, to good pornography, as trashy romance novels are to good literature? Is it just the lower end of the genre?

NM: It's certainly complicated. Take Laura's criteria, pictures that are transparently cynical. The model's worn out, the photographer's worn out, disgusting. Yet that can be arousing in a funny way. For instance, in
Hustler
, often I find that the most interesting section is those cheap Polaroid pictures that untalented photographers send of women who are not models.

JM: The reality turns you on?

NM: The sordid reality. My sexuality, I expect, is aroused by knowledge. The moment I know more than I knew before, I'm excited. Those gritty Polaroid shots in
Hustler
are often more interesting. They communicate. You know, the picture of some waitress who lives in Sioux Falls. I know more at that moment about Sioux Falls, about waitresses—even if they're lying, even if she isn't a waitress, there's something about the very manifest of the lie that's fascinating. It arouses your curiosity. Whereas superb pictures of models can get boring. There tends to be a sameness in them. Aren't enough flaws present? The very question of the sordid is . . . tricky.

“You know, talking about sex is always kind of sexy,” Laura laughs, “so I wanted to fuck Norman. Absolutely. I was sitting there during the interview thinking about having sex with Norman. Was I fantasizing about sucking his cock? Maybe, probably, knowing me, ha, ha, ha!”

LB: Have you been sexually pursued by literary groupies? What's it like being fucked as an image rather than a person?

NM: Well, I've usually been drawn to women who aren't necessarily that interested in my work. My present wife had read one book of mine before we met. She hardly knew anything about me. It's probably analogous to the poor rich girl, who wants to be loved for herself and not her money, remember all those movies?

“Norman was very loving toward me,” Laura remembers fondly. “He always looked me in the eyes and made me feel like what I had to say was important. I felt beautiful and sexy around him, not slutty, even though I was in my slutty period of life. He had this intense serious side that was so present surrounded by his smiles and chuckles. He was stocky, like a hobbit. It felt like he was from the center of the Earth or from the center of the universe. The things he said usually surprised me. I expected him to say big profound things and instead, he would say very basic simple things that were immediately obvious, even though I may have never thought of it before.”

LB: In Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall, he's on the street and he walks up to this little old lady and says to her something like, “Why are relationships so difficult?” And she says, “Love fades...” As a man who's had six marriages, what is your reaction to this dialogue? Do you think that love fades and do you feel that sex fades?

NM: I don't think that sex fades in marriage necessarily. Without talking about my personal life, I'd say that compatibility is nearer to the problem than sex. What I mean is people can have marvelous sex and not be terribly compatible. That sets up a great edginess in marriage. Some people, in fact, can only have good sex with people who are essentially incompatible with them. I might have been in that category for years, I don't know. If you're terribly combative, then you're drawn toward mates who are not too compatible. Anyone who has a violent or ugly or combative edge is not going to be comfortable with someone who is really sweet and submissive. They want something more abrasive in their daily life. Otherwise they are likely to lose their good opinion of themselves.

There's nothing worse than being brutal to somebody who's good to you. Whereas if you're living with someone whose ideas irritate the living shit out of you, and you fight with them every day and feel justified about it, that can be healthier than living with a soul whose ideas are compatible to yours. All the same, if you do choose this fundamental incompatibility, there will come a point where it ceases to be fun and turns into its opposite. Faults in the mate that were half-charming suddenly become unendurable.

Every one of us who has been in love knows how fragile—what's a good word for skin?—how fragile is the membrane of love. It has to be mended every day and nurtured. We have to anticipate all the places where it's getting a little weak and go there and breathe on it, shape it again. In a combative relationship, obviously, that's difficult. You have to have a great animal vigor between combative people or they just can't make it for long.

JM: What about love fading?

NM: Well, I don't think love fades; I don't think there's anything automatic about it. I think most of us aren't good enough for love. I think self-pity is probably the most rewarding single emotion in the world for masturbators, which is one of the reasons, I suppose, I'm opposed to masturbation, because it encourages other vices to collect around you. Self-pity is one of the first. You lie in bed, pull off, and say to yourself, I have such wonderful, beautiful, tender, sweet, deep, romantic, exciting and sensual emotions, why is it that no woman can appreciate how absolutely fabulous I am? Why can't I offer these emotions to someone else? Self-pity comes rolling in, and cuts us off from recognizing that love is a reward. Love is not something that is going to come up and solve your problems. Love is something you get after you've solved enough of your problems so that something in Providence itself takes pity on you. I always believed that whoever or whatever it is, some angel, some sour sort of our angel, finally says, “Look at these poor motherfuckers. He and she have been working so hard for so many years. Let's throw him or her a bone.” So they meet and find love. Then they have to know what to do with it.

JM: Love is a function of having paid your dues?

NM: Truman Capote has got this book he's writing,
Answered Prayers
. I gather from something he said once that its theme is that the worst thing that befalls people is that their prayers are answered. Which is not a cheap idea. Love is the perfect example. Everybody prays for love, but once they get love, they have to be worthy of it. Love is the most perishable of human emotions. It never fades. That's my answer to the question. There is absolutely no reason why people can't love each other more every day of their lives for eighty years. I absolutely believe that. Without that, I have no faith in love whatsoever. I think it would be a diabolical universe if you're introduced to all these wonderful sentiments that illumine your existence but something is put into the very nature of it that will make it fade. That's the sentiment of a person who is full of self-pity: Love fades. That old woman was full of self-pity.

“Norman loved to make himself laugh,” Laura recalls. “He seemed to have such a good time inside himself. And I specifically remember how Norman would take a long time to think about the questions before he answered. Then, sometimes he would get so serious and those eyes would pierce into mine, he would hold his chin and I felt like I had to listen very carefully because now it was very important for me to totally understand what he was saying.”

JM: Norman, I'd like to discuss the nature of inhibition, something that interests me. To put it bluntly, why is it that some women like to get fucked in the ass and some women find it distasteful? Some women like to suck cocks, some women don't. It surely is not purely physical.

NM: You can't talk about it generally, you just can't. Everything we do sexually is as characteristic of us as our features. The question you ask is truly bottomless. You could say to me, why do some people have noses with an overhang, and why do some tilt up? Why do we respond to these noses in different ways? I could give an answer; I mean, a nose that tilts up often suggests optimism, confidence about the future, fearlessness, but a nose that turns over suggests a certain pessimism about the very shape of things, an attachment to sentiment of doom. You have to ask next: What is the nature of form? Why do curves do these things to us? But in sexuality, you also have to ask which period of one's life are we talking about? Anyone who's lived with a woman for a few years learns that a woman's tastes can change as much as a man's. There are women who detest being fucked in the ass, as you put it—you see, I refuse to use those words myself... The woman who wants nothing to do with a phallus in her crack one year is turned on immensely by it another year. I will make one general observation: It's very dangerous to stick it up a woman's ass. It tends to make them more promiscuous. I'll leave that with your readers. They can think about it from their own experience. They can test it out. Those who are scientifically inclined can immediately approach their mate and tool her, if they're able. Then they can observe what happens, watch her at parties, get a private detective, and check up on her.