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 NORRIS CHURCH-MAILER ...a good writer, too |
The path from "Studs"
to Mrs. Norman Mailer
of TheColumnists.com
In the summer of
1979 there was a big black tie party in a Manhattan hotel celebrating
the 75th birthday of famed writer James T. Farrell.
Every kid in my Brooklyn neighborhood had read Farrell’s
"Studs Lonigan" books describing the tough kid from
the Chicago streets, where Farrell had grown up, and how cool
he was with the gals, how confident he was about success and
how suave he looked with that cigarette dangling from his mouth.
This was no wimpy Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s "The
Catcher in the Rye."
In the 1960s, when I was generally taking a seat in the Yankee
Stadium press box to cover the Bronx Bombers, a well-dressed
elderly man would often sit next to me. He never mentioned his
name as he asked questions about Tony Kubek and Bobby Richardson
and especially Mickey Mantle, fascinated as most of us were,
with the blond Bomber.
It was, of course, James T. Farrell. He had lost his fastball
by then and his writings appeared not in the elegant New Yorker
but in some throwaway literary magazine where $50 was a big check.
But he still had that baseball bug that he had carried from the
1920s.
He wanted to talk about Mantle. I wanted to talk about Lonigan.
We had dinner one night, Farrell and his girl friend, Janet and
I, with much talk about the decline of the Yankees (this was
the fading 1970s era of Bronx baseball) and a little talk of
how he came up with Lonigan.
“Ahh, Lonigan,” Farrell said. “Everybody
I knew in my Chicago neighborhood was part of Lonigan.”
He soon mentioned that he was being feted by friends for his
75th birthday and I would be receiving an invite for the event.
A few days later the handsome invitation arrived and it said
that Norman Mailer, a close pal of Farrell, wanted us to join
him and some 200 friends in Farrell’s honor.
Mailer was the MC at the event and entertained the crowd in that
clipped London accent of a guy from Brooklyn with tales about
his own books from "The Naked and the Dead" to "The
Executioner’s Song" about killer Gary Gilmore.
He did talk a little about Farrell, very little, and actually
mentioned that Farrell’s writings about Studs Lonigan had
motivated him before World War II while he was at Harvard to
think of himself as a writer.
At the end of the evening I walked up to Mailer, a writer I admired
immensely but never met, for a quick introduction by Farrell.
I didn’t pass muster being only a sportswriter and Mailer
turned away quickly to talk with others.
There was a woman at Mailer’s side, a gorgeous red-headed
classic beauty, and being an admirer of things classic I stared
at her, for 10 or 15 seconds before taking my leave.
Now I have read through her own book. This is Norris Church Mailer,
the sixth and final wife of the literary icon and egomaniacal
author of some of the best of 20th century writings.
Ms Mailer’s book "A Ticket to the Circus" (Random
House, $26) is a wonderful, witty, intriguing study of life on
the back side of a famous man.
There can hardly be a more dangerous, more difficult, more complex
life chore than that of being the spouse of some famous writer,
artist, politician, president, entertainer or Fortune 500 CEO.
Norris seems to be able to capture the joy and the pain, the
arrogance and the laughter, the privacy and the fame of being
attached to so famous a figure as Norman Mailer for some 33 years.
She has that very rare skill of knowing how to contain the large
ego of the man around her and enjoy the benefits of his success.
Names are dropped in the book like pennies in a fountain with
luminous stories about Muhammad Ali and Jackie Kennedy, Truman
Capote and Gore Vidal, Imelda Marcos and Bill Clinton.
Originally named Barbara Jean Davis, Norris (her first husband’s
last name) is from Arkansas and met a hustling young charismatic
politician named Bill Clinton. It was at a fund raiser also attended
by Clinton’s girl friend at the time, the unattractive,
glasses-wearing intellectual pal from Yale named Hillary Rodham.
When asked if she had ever slept with the future president Norris
simply smiles and asks, “Who didn’t?”
Norris was a model, an actress, a painter and a damn fine writer.
She’s no Norman Mailer with the keyboard but not many are.
She can tell a good tale as she does here and the book is worthy
of the Mailer name, husband or wife.
So many of us young scribblers want to grow up to be Ernest Hemingway
or James T. Farrell or even Norman Mailer.
I have always wondered what it is really like to be the other
half of a marriage to names as uproarious as those.
Norris Church Mailer gives us a wonderful look inside. Ladies
might have to have an iron stomach for that life’s chore.
©2010 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted April 26, 2010.
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