The Writer and the World (53 page)

In the early days Mailer could say of a rival: “If I didn’t make a vow to use no obscene language, I would say that Wagner was full of an unmarketable commodity.” This was the Village Mailer. At the end he said of Wagner: “He’s the lead hobby horse in a wooden field.” This was funnier; it also made more political sense. On election night, the fight lost and won, the cheering crowd followed Mailer from headquarters across Eighth Avenue to his car. They were also cheering Mailer’s wife and Mailer’s mother, both of whom had taken part in the campaign. The politician as family man: to this extent the campaign had become orthodox.

Three weeks before, Mailer had told a television reporter that running a campaign was like writing a novel. The same confidence was required; there were analogous problems of creation. “Your brains are working all the time. The writer works on a world, brings it to a resolution; and that world changes him. When a writer finishes a novel he is a changed man.”

I
F
M
AILER
had a political base, it was his glamour as a writer. But glamour also stood in his way.

At the annual dinner of the Village Independent Democrats the two speakers were to be men who had worked with Senator Eugene McCarthy and the late Senator Robert Kennedy. McCarthy, Kennedy: these were the magic names not only of the left, the protesting, the liberal, but also of those asserting an intellectual separateness and therefore
content to lose. “I know a man who supported fourteen losing candidates,” a visitor from the Lexington Avenue Democrats said. Mailer was going to lose, but the Lexington visitor wasn’t prepared to admit Mailer as one of his losers. The ideas were good, but Mailer belonged to another area of American glamour.

Benign now, still powerfully built rather than “unwillingly fat” (his own words), a little tired after a day spent on a campaign paper, blue eyes twinkling in a harassed, mobile face, Mailer was undeniably a presence among the Village Independent Democrats at their pre-dinner cocktails.

“I’ve talked to Mr. Mailer,” a forty-year-old woman said. (Over severe, separating foundations, her neckline plunged and plunged.) “And he says I can follow him around in the press car and I want to go everywhere he goes.” Her escort, led by the hand, smiled neutrally.

Banning, the campaign manager, listed the evening’s engagements. They were to end about midnight.

The woman hesitated, then chose the dinner.

Schwartzman, the nineteen-year-old student on the Mailer advance staff, said, “She probably said she was a freelance and writing a feature. You do get types like that. Now the agency girl, that’s more my type of writer. A little tall, but still.”

The agency girl, blonde, tanned, cool in a flaming red sweater, had just joined the campaign. She too was writing a feature. In the car afterwards she got out her notebook.

“Why haven’t you gone to Vietnam, Mr. Mailer?”

“I don’t want to get killed.”

“I was there for two years. I wasn’t killed.”

“That is a horrible and obscene war. I would have done something. I would have got killed.”

Banning leaned over the front seat to talk of campaign plans. Mailer sat forward, and the two men discussed walking tours and the wisdom of campaigning in certain East Side bars. Mailer didn’t want to campaign in bars. It would mean either doing a lot of drinking in one place or getting in the way of a voter who wanted a drink.

The agency girl said, “Do you think you have enough of a political record, Mr. Mailer?”

Mailer turned to her and smiled. “As a man who’s been married four times—take this down—I say to politicians never run on your past record.”

While her pen worked, Banning talked about an article on the campaign in
Life.
“On Wednesday it was four pages. On Thursday it was two. On Friday it was one and a half.”

Mailer said it was hard on the writer. “That’s why
Life
’s going broke.”

“People say,” Banning said,
“Life
’s going broke because of what they’re paying you for your moon shot article.”

Mailer smiled at the agency girl. “Perhaps they’re trying to rebuke me.”

“Perhaps,” the girl said, “I should get you angry. Mr. Mailer, why do you talk so much?”

It was the sort of newspaper feature the campaign was attracting.

We were in the Lower East Side. A “surviving” area, Mailer called it affectionately: decaying red-brick houses, narrow shops with dirty windows, an occasional empty lot.

“If you are Lithuanian,” a man said on the steps of the East Midtown Reform Democratic Club, “how come your name is Mailer?”

“Lithuanian Jew,” Mailer insisted. “On both sides.”

It was a small hall, panelled down one side and decorated with KLM posters, bunting and the Stars and Stripes. There were about forty people on folding metal chairs.

“By the look of you,” Mailer said, “I can see you are not a soft Democratic Club. Let’s have the questions. I can see that the person who asks the first question is going to be in as much trouble as me.”

The question was about the fifty-first state. “You think the Governor of New York would let you or anybody else get away from them?”

“We all know what breaks up an unhappy marriage. It’s a smart Jewish lawyer. I submit that I am the smartest Jewish attorney in town.”

The mood didn’t last. A woman asked about CCNY. She sat next to a tweed-jacketed man who might have been her husband; they both looked like teachers. “Why don’t you send them all to Harvard and give them all a really
good
education?” This was the Jewish backlash; she was speaking of the blacks and Puerto Ricans.

“You know you are just giving expression to your prejudice. Harvard’s my old college—”

“That’s why I said it.”

“Let’s assume that Harvard’s going down the drain—”

“You’re putting words in her mouth!” the man shouted.

“Our universities are to education what
The New Yorker is
to literature. A minor organ with a major function.” Laughter cleared the air. “Pardon this digression. No one should trust a speaker who strays from the point.” He addressed the man: “You recognize the unhappiness with which you speak?” It was a direct, gentle inquiry.

“I do,” the man said. His response was like a reflex; his tone was confessional.

A moment of stillness: the man and woman, for all their passion, and the respectable jauntiness of their “budget” clothes, were older than they had first appeared.

It wasn’t a perfect solution, Mailer said, exploiting the moment. But it was better that the colleges should make some adjustments rather than be destroyed altogether. If the blacks hadn’t been betrayed so often, if opportunities had been given them, “you would have had blacks as mean and as ugly as any—” His mischievousness was like the other face of anger; he was deliberately destroying the mood.

“You are asking the kids to pay for it!” the woman shouted.

“Let him talk!”

“The kids will have,” Mailer said, above the voices calling for order, “the exhilarating existential experience of going to school with black people.”

That was the end. And, unexpectedly, there was applause, Mailer walking smartly down, arms held out wide, palms open, like a wrestler about to charge.

The next halt, a fund-raising one, was at a place called the Electric Circus in the Village. It was a good name. In the stairways and corridors blue, red and mauve neon strips reflected on walls that might have been papered with aluminum foil; and at the end of this neon fantasy was a wide white hall, packed with the young. It was a paid-up Mailer crowd. But Mailer, solitary before the microphone, appeared irritated. “You are here to see me work, is that it?” The questions were too sympathetic. “When we win, which would give all of us great concern—” But there was little of that. It was as though, out of his security here, Mailer had committed himself to frowns and silences and was waiting to be provoked. “Now, listen. I’m much more conservative than most of you people here. I’ll work for and support your neighbourhood, but I don’t think I’ll approve of it.”

After that, ten minutes at the League of Women Voters in the public
library opposite the Museum of Modern Art. An anti-Rockefeller art-student demo going on outside that: a swift exchange of literature, campaign with campaign. And then a confusion of causes: Badillo, one of Mailer’s rivals, coming out of the library with his staff, Mailer going in with his, everybody with leaflets for everybody else.

“Everywhere I go I see Badillo buttons. I feel Badillo’s staked you guys.”

“Norman, Norman,” the Badillo supporter said. “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

A meeting with the East Side Democrats was on the schedule. But only the wife of the campaign photographer was there, in a belted pink mackintosh. She had been waiting on the pavement a long time; the club room was locked. The busy campaign, unexpectedly isolated, reassembled; and then Banning told us to hurry over to the West Side Democrats; we were already very late for them.

“Advance did a fine job,” someone in the second car said.

“I’ve been talking to taxi-drivers,” a foreign reporter said (he had joined us at the Electric Circus). “They may know about
The Naked.
But they don’t always know who the author is.”

“I was talking to an old Jew in Brooklyn yesterday. I told him about Mailer. He said, ‘Isn’t he the guy stabbed his wife?’ Nine years, and he’s talking about it like he’d read it in the paper that morning.”

“He probably gets his papers late.”

They talked about the agency girl.

“You think she’s for real, a writer?”

“With looks like that she could be anything. But she’s a groupie. She’s only going for the big man.”

We weren’t late for the West Side Democrats. A dingy first-floor hall overlooking Broadway, photographs of Robert Kennedy, old Eugene McCarthy stickers, the Stars and Stripes. A mixed crowd of about fifty, some Puerto Ricans, a couple of blacks. One of Mailer’s rivals was still talking.

“… I tell you one thing we can do real fast to get better crime control …” This was Congressman Scheuer, spending half a million dollars to come last in the primary, below Mailer.

Mailer entered, his hair frizzing out now. The TV lights blazed on him. Heads turned; hands were shaken.

“… get police out of all station-house and routine jobs … all non–crime control functions …”

The applause wasn’t for the Congressman. It was for Mailer, withdrawing after his false entry. Presently, through the mêlée, the Congressman walked out, smiling, a private figure.

But they were a dull audience, and because they were dull, Mailer tried. Irony, to begin with. CCNY was being taken over, he said, by the same Communist plot Mayor Wagner had talked about some years ago. The audience remained vacant. “That was a joke.” He told an Irish joke in an Irish accent. Silence. “Now that I’ve lost this club”—The laugh came; the audience relaxed. Mailer talked for twenty minutes; it was the best speech of the evening.

I
N THE MORNING
there was a story in the
New York Times.

And at the Overseas Press Club they were gloomy. Neither the
Times
nor the
Post
nor the
News
had sent a man to the press conference that morning, when Mailer and his running mate—Jimmy Breslin, a popular columnist, a heavy, dark-haired Irishman of menacing and explosive appearance—were to present a paper on housing. Banning had brought a boxful of copies; he found only about fifteen takers, radio and TV people, who always served the campaign well, some foreign reporters, and the agency girl, now in green. The TV cameras and the lights played on her for a little. She remained cool. Out of a cross face Mailer smiled.

A reporter asked for a statement on the “integrity” of the New York press.

“The simple statement,” Breslin said, “is that no one’s here. They’ll begin to listen when they hear shotguns on Park Avenue.”

“Electric Circus,” Mailer said afterwards, looking at the
Times
, which Banning had folded over to show the story. “I didn’t like the name. I didn’t like the building.”

“It was a horrible building,” Banning said.

“How much did we get out of it?”

“A couple of hundred bucks.”

“Not worth it.”

“I was talking to an AP man,” Banning said, explaining the poor attendance at the conference. “They had a list up in the office. ‘These stories we will cover this morning.’ And another list. ‘These stories we will not cover this morning.’ We’ll call
another
press conference tomorrow at the
same
time.
That’s
the way to test them.”

I was beginning to recognize Banning’s style in drama. It might have been his diplomatic training; he had served for some time in the American Foreign Service. Or it might have been his later work in broadcasting. (“I couldn’t tell you even today,” he said after the campaign, “whether politics or show business is my first love.”)

About thirty reporters came the next day. The agency girl wore cream. The
Times
sent a man; so did the
Post.
There had been a lot on the TV networks the previous evening—the interviews, so casual, given an extra, separate reality when slotted into the news programmes on the small screen—but Mailer was still complaining.

“We have to bludgeon our way into a newspaper office to get a small piece. They are trying to make our campaign ridiculous and up to a point they have succeeded. We have made mistakes on the way; we have played into their hands.”

Tempers were shorter; there were fewer jokes. Mailer looked tired and aggressive; it was his face that suggested defeat. But he might have been acting: his face was so mobile, his moods so quick.