Mailer remembered

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.”

The stage wasn’t the only place for combat. When Mailer opened the discussion to the audience, Elizabeth Hardwick, Betty Friedan, John Hollander and Susan Sontag each took the microphone. One high point of the evening belonged to Cynthia Ozick, who put a sweet-voiced query to Mailer that cannot be printed here. Anatole Broyard wanted to know what sex would be like after the revolution; an exasperated Greer replied, “You may as well relax, honey, because whatever they’re asking for, it’s not from you.”

With Mailer, writers were always at the center of things, and it was this riotous conversation that came to mind in Carnegie Hall as Brown recalled the man. She quoted E.L. Doctorow, who saw Mailer’s outrageousness as a calculated risk, “having the social benefit of keeping the novelist alive in the culture.” That is the shock of “Town Bloody Hall”: just how alive in the culture the writers – Mailer, Hardwick, Sontag – were.

But a memorial is not a battleground, and so perhaps it was fitting that the spirit of contention was absent at Carnegie Hall. Trombonist Peter McEachern played “Requiem for a Boxer.” Friends spoke of treasured meals. Penn read from his BlackBerry. We live in different times.

Mailer’s children did, however, understand the need for spectacle, and they provided. There was Michael quipping, “We’re not the Von Trapp family,” before recounting sparring sessions with his dad. There was Stephen’s spot-on impression of the paterfamilias – hand tucked in jacket pocket, clearing his throat and unleashing the requisite expletives. And finally, more soberly, there was Elizabeth, recalling with urgency the last days with her father in the hospital, the way his hand was swollen and warm and her fear of cheap sentimentality.

When the novelists paid tribute, it was not so much the man they invoked but what remained of him. For Didion, it came down to sentences. She described Mailer as “a great and obsessed stylist” and read from “The Executioner’s Song,” saying even the punctuation aloud.

DeLillo called Mailer “not just a voice but a force” and lifted a copy of “The Naked and the Dead.” A Signet paperback, 50 years old.

“75 cents,” DeLillo said. Laughter. He continued reading the cover copy. “14th printing. Over 2 million copies sold.” Pause. “Now a great motion picture,” he intoned, and I remembered how with those old editions, the cellulose dried out and the paper stiffened and when you would bend the corner of a page to mark your place, the tip broke off in your fingers.

DeLillo held up the small book. “This is what gives a writer something to do after breakfast each morning,” he said. “Thank you.”

And then he turned and left the stage.