Norman Mailer

Brett Ratner is not allowed to use the trees in New York City parks to dangle 80-pound starlet Olivia Thirlby from for a sex scene. [NY Daily News]

Sarah Jessica Parker is down on the New York she helped create. [NY Mag]  read more »

At around 7:45 p.m. on Monday, April 28, writer Carl Bernstein was mingling at the cocktail hour before the PEN Literary Awards at the Museum of Natural History, Coca Cola in hand, looking very healthy. “I ride a bike and listen to a lot of music,” he said. “I mostly listen to classical but also rock.  read more »

Lose an editor; gain a media property. John Koblin details every maneuver in one very busy week for Rupert Murdoch. This piece has everything: The Wall Street Journal, Marcus Brauchli, Newsday, The New York Times, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.  read more »

Sixty-six-year-old Carole Mallory has had many famous lovers, among them, she says, Robert De Niro, Sean Connery, Richard Gere and Rod Stewart. “I rejected Jack Nicholson,” she told Pub Crawl in a phone interview Friday. “And I enjoyed Warren Beatty.”

Towering above them all was the late Norman Mailer, whom Ms. Mallory, a former model, actress and journalist, met at Elaine’s one night in 1983 and dated for nine years thereafter.  read more »

Members of Norman Mailer's family are in the process of developing a new writer's colony based at Mailer's longtime home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, it was announced at Carnegie Hall this evening at the end of a memorial honoring the late writer.

Lawrence Schiller, who collaborated with Mailer on a number of books and counted him among his closest friends, said that an advisory board, consisting of Günter Grass, Joan Didion, William Kennedy, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, has been formed.  read more »

Curious how long it takes to put together a memorial befitting an author of Norman Mailer's stature? Oh, about five months. It was announced today that Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, Tina Brown, Sean Penn, William Kennedy, amongst others, will takes turns fondly recollecting the "id and (the imp) of American Literature" at the April 9 event at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Mailer passed away on Nov. 10 of last year. The memorial, hosted by Charlie Rose, is open to the public, but free tickets are required; they can be picked up only after 11 a.m. on the day of the memorial at Carnegie Hall.

Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95) is the latest from “gender expert” Susan Shapiro Barash. I picked it up out of idle curiosity (are women’s reasons for lying really different from men’s?) and would have put it straight back down (the writing is shockingly bad), but I was struck by the bold amorality of Ms. Barash’s approach: “I neither condemn nor condone the lies women tell,” she solemnly declares. Turns out that’s a lie. In fact, she thinks fibs are fab. Here’s the final sentence of her book, the sum of the wisdom she’s squeezed from “extensive personal interviews with women and experts in the field of psychology and counseling”:

“In my research for Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets, I’ve come to recognize lying as an inestimable weapon in the female arsenal as women search for personal retribution and satisfaction.” Inestimable weapon? Female arsenal? Personal retribution? Looks like the gender wars are heating up.  read more »

Eliot Spitzer just made his debut on a Hillary Clinton conference call just now, along with New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, to discuss economic development.

When the line was opened up for questions, the first one was directed at Spitzer, about his plan to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, a policy he withdrew after Clinton ran into a world of trouble for refusing to criticize it at a debate.  read more »

Norman Mailer's widow, Norris Church Mailer, is writing a memoir that will be published by Random House and edited by David Ebershoff, Publisher's Weekly reports. Mr. Ebershoff also edited Mailer's last four books, including his last, The Castle in the Forest.

The book was sold to Random House by John Taylor “Ike” Williams, who works in the literary and dramatic rights branch of Boston-based lawfirm Fish & Richardson, and who has served as Ms. Church Mailer's literary agent for years. Mr. Williams, who did not immediately respond to request for comment, is also one of the legal representatives for the Mailer Estate.  read more »

It has been almost two months since Norman Mailer died. "Before that he lived a big, loud life, which he spent asking questions, accumulating bruises and setting all kinds of people’s hair on fire," according to the Observer's Leon Neyfakh.

Boxes full of papers of that firestarting life, laid down side by side, would run more than the length of a football field from end zone to end zone.  read more »

Morris Dickstein of The Los Angeles Times wonders if some kind of literary generation has passed away along with the death of Norman Mailer, Grace Paley and Kurt Vonnegut this year. He wrote that, "Critics love the idea of literary generations, but it would be a challenge to find themes or ideas to link the disparate work of Norman Mailer, Grace Paley and Kurt Vonnegut ... [Yet n]o one would mistake a paragraph of theirs for the prose of another writer."  read more »

The late Norman Mailer's 29-year-old son John tells The New York Post's Liz Smith today that his movie adaptation of The Naked and the Dead, which was announced in a press release on the day of his father's death, was not meant as a cash-in.

John Mailer said he was "appalled" at the timing of the press release, which he called "an accident of fate."

"I am not blaming anyone for this, but it was premature and inaccurate to say the least," Mr. Mailer said. "It is true I did an adaptation of this novel sometime ago. He [Norman Mailer] liked it very much and signed over rights to me. Someday perhaps it will be a film. But for now I am appalled at the timing of it all. I just want to disavow that and say I would never have connected such a project with my family's loss."

August author Gay Talese has reportedly figured out “what has fucked up journalism.” At the launch party on Wednesday night for a new magazine called Lapham’s Quarterly, which is under the control of erstwhile Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, a New York reporter got an earful from the dapper scribe. Musing on the media’s apparent decline, Mr. Talese evoked the recently-deceased writer Norman Mailer. “"Mailer was out there mentally challenging, not worrying about anything that was contrary to prevailing thought,” Mr. Talese is quoted as saying. After moving on to everybody else in the industry, Mr. Talese apparently didn’t see the point in censoring himself just because he was talking to a fellow journalist. “Today people worry about being contrary to prevailing thought. They don’t want to be out on a limb, don’t want to be a contrarian, don’t want to be unpopular, don’t want to be unpatriotic. That’s what has fucked up journalism. No one speaks for dissent. Who's the face of dissent today? Give me one name of someone who personifies dissent. Period. Zero. Nobody!" he said. We won’t attempt to meet his challenge either, but it sure looks like Mr. Talese could be on his way to proving himself wrong.

Gay Talese Shames Us at the Launch of ‘Lapham’s Quarterly’ [Intelligencer]

 

No writer was more competitive, or ambitious, than Norman Mailer. But if sales are the measure of the public's mind, then honors clearly belong to Kurt Vonnegut, according to the Associated Press.  read more »

In a weird way, it’s fitting that the Gilmore Girls: The Complete Series Collection would arrive this week, just after Norman Mailer’s passing. It was not his last television appearance before his death, but it was close to it. And it might have been one of his most surprising—at least to the men who revered his work. (If they ever saw the show, they wouldn’t dare admit it.)

Earlier this year, I attended a luncheon in honor of Norman Mailer, on the occasion of his latest book. There were men, everywhere, waiting to ask him: did he believe in God? Why did he write about Hitler? What did he eat for breakfast? I had something else on my mind. When he came to my table, I hollered across it: “Mr. Mailer, why were you on Gilmore Girls?”

Mr. Mailer didn’t flinch. “I did it for my son,” he said, and went on to explain that his son Stephen was a struggling actor, and Norman had agreed to do a scene with him (he played himself, his son played a journalist interviewing him) to get him on the show. He also rhapsodized about Suki, a character played by Melissa McCarthy, who ran the inn where Mr. Mailer’s interview was going on. He thought she was hilarious.  read more »

• A bunch of geeks join the new J.J. Abram’s Star Trek movie.
• Why can’t die-hard fans quit Weezer? MTV lets us know.
• Guilty pleasure movies: ones that the critics hate, but we love. Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter Is Dead, anyone?
• Proust was a neuroscientist. “[I]n understanding the brain, artists and writers got there first, anticipating many major scientific discoveries in their work.”
• Norman Mailer wrote his own obituary for Boston Magazine in 1979. “Gloria Steinem stated: ‘A pity. He was getting ready to see the light.’”

It's true that Norman Mailer had a "short relationship" with The Village Voice after helping found it in 1955, as Voice editor in chief Tony Ortega told Media Mob earlier today, by way of explaining his paper's decision to mark Mailer's death with only a 1200-word obit on an inside page. The incendiary weekly column he wrote for the paper only lasted a few months, and once he gave that up—apparently he couldn’t take all the typographical errors--he pretty much checked out.

But according to one of Mailer's two co-founders, Edward Fancher, he was quite devoted to the paper while he worked there.

 

   read more »

In the wake of Norman Mailer's death Saturday, it's seemed like every news outlet in the city has had extended coverage of the writer's rollicking life and his influence on American letters. But the paper Mailer helped found in 1955, The Village Voice, had surprisngly little to say.

This week's edition of the paper contains a 1,200-word obit that starts at the bottom of a page dominated by a large cartoon. The cover, which highlights a story about the dangers of getting hit by a bus in New York, makes no mention of Mailer. But the paper did run a two-page spread on longtime Voice photographer Fred McDarrah who passed away last week--which it did flag on the cover.

Voice editor Tony Ortega explains the paper's thinking after the jump...  read more »

Norman Mailer was the id of literature, as Leon Neyfakh tells us in this week's issue of the Observer, but he was also one of the last writers pursuing the Great American Novel, according to The Indepedent's John Walsh. "Mailer believed in it utterly," Mr. Walsh wrote.  read more »

The first time John Updike met the late Norman Mailer was in 1964, after a literary function in New York intended to ease Cold-War tensions by bringing together Soviet and American writers.

"[Mailer] came up to me on the street," Mr. Updike told The Observer in a phone interview Sunday. "It was kind of dark, a little spooky. I'm enough of a rural type to get easily spooked in New York City. He said to me, 'Are you really John Updike?' I swore that I was, and he said, 'You're so handsome! I can’t believe you're so handsome.' He was a visionary, I think, to see this in me. I think he was a bit drunk at the time."

Keep in mind this took place after Mailer wrote that piece in Esquire where he said Mr. Updike's writing reminded him of "stale garlic." Apparently, Mr. Updike didn't hold a grudge: "I didn't mind what he said about me," he said. "I thought it was kind of nice."

Tales of Mailer.  read more »

Neyfakh: tales of Mailer; Weiss: His New York Jewish public self was American triumph; Andrew O'Hagan: Five Snapshots of the Lion in Winter.  read more »

The subject was old age. Norman Mailer said there was a grace in aging. He didn’t feel as angry or self-involved as he once did; he wasn’t wrapped up in his disappointments. He had set out to be a “major historical figure,” like the literary matinee idols of his youth, Steinbeck and Hemingway. That hadn’t happened. He accepted that he was a writer.

It was shortly after his 84th, and last, birthday, in January, and he was having dinner in the Upper East Side apartment of author-activist-patron Jean Stein.  read more »