Advertisements for Themselves

Norman Mailer said he was “just along for the ride.” Give us a break. The onetime enfant terrible of American letters has never willingly been known to take a back seat to anyone--although the other day he really tried. The female Mailer, his wife, Norris, was star of the pair’s curious jaunt through L.A., to promote her own first book on local radio, TV, and at a home that’s the L.A. social/political hot spot.

“Windchill Summer” (Random House) is a coming-of-age story about two girls in Arkansas. It has received some rave reviews. But it is not the book that husband Norman thinks it could have been--if his wife had only asked for his help. “I could have improved it by at least 5%,” he said with a laugh. But she wouldn’t even let him look at it until she was finished.

“I once sent him a love poem and it came back all red-penciled,” Norris explained at the Hotel Bel-Air, where Norman had waited patiently (and productively) for his wife to return from her book-touting chores. No harm in holding an interview of his own with an out-of-town reporter about an upcoming O.J. Simpson TV movie for which he has written the script. A guy has to do something in his spare time.

When she finally walked into the room, he rose to greet her. She broke into applause--as if to say, “See, you can do it.” The triumph was that he had lifted his arthritic bones from the chair without the aid of his cane.

Mailer, 77, isn’t quite the specimen he used to be. But Norris, 26 years younger, said she’s “amazed” on a daily basis at the potency of his mind. “I wake up every day and still wonder at my luck that this is the man I am having breakfast with.”

Besides, she’s not in such tip-top shape herself, she said. The gorgeous long, copper-color hair that usually tops her 5-foot-10-inch model’s physique is currently synthetic. Treatment for a recently diagnosed cancer has temporarily made her bald, she said.

What kind of cancer?

Her eyes lock onto her husband’s, and she declines to give specifics. “You think I’m right about this?” she asks him in a soft, sweet Southern voice. “Absolutely,” he bellows protectively. “It’s not a secret, but this [interview] is about your book, and that is not the first fact you want people to know about you.”

Comparing Marriage to Electoral Returns

That they are there for one another after 25 years is a monument to whatever love might be. Norman, pressed for some notion of what that emotion means, steers diplomatically. “Each love is as different as each fingerprint,” he said. “In some ways, it’s like an election. Take a husband and wife who have been together for many years. It’s a very good marriage if the love ratio is something like 58:42, or 61:39. About the time it’s 51:49, you’ve got a querulous marriage--a pretty close election. It’s very easy to fall out of love at 51:49.”

As for the Mailers, he said, “We wear well, we really do.” He credits her maternal talents as the glue. “She has been a wonderful mother and stepmother,” he said of the nine children she has either raised or befriended since meeting her husband. One from her previous marriage, one who is theirs together, and seven from his previous five marriages--the oldest of whom is Norris Mailer’s age.

“I just loved the kids and they loved me--and still do,” she said of the assorted children and grandchildren often seen rambling around the light-filled, spacious house that faces the ocean in Provincetown, Mass., where the Mailers now live year-round. The senior writer interrupts, “If Norris and I were drowning, I always say the children would save her first.”

Norman and Norris Mailer are one of the juicier stories of our literary times. He was the blustery, brawling genius who hit it big at 25 with “The Naked and the Dead,” and rarely left the spotlight after that--through 40 books (including one with the modest title, “Advertisements for Myself”), two Pulitzer Prizes, assorted filmmaking and scriptwriting forays, six wives, nine kids, and numerous scandals involving sex, violence, or both.

Norris was 18 and working in an Atkins, Ark., pickle factory (where part of her new book takes place) when Mailer was working on wife number four. She was 25, an art teacher, painter and divorced mother, when she wangled an invite to a cocktail party in a nearby town.

She had heard that the famous novelist would be a guest. “I hadn’t read anything of his except “Marilyn” (his book on Monroe), she said. “But I considered myself a literary person.” They clicked.

When she left town with her baby, bound for Norman and New York a few weeks later, the promising young politician she’d been dating came to say goodbye. “Do you know what you’re doing, going after this guy?” she said Bill Clinton asked. She had no idea, she said, but she was determined to do it anyway. (Clinton and she weren’t right for each other, she said, and they only dated casually.)

The Odd Couple, as some called them in those days, lived the literary high life for the next five years. She modeled, painted, did an acting stint on “All My Children.” In 1980--after their son, John Buffalo, was born--they finally married. But even this part of the story is as convoluted as some of Mailer’s complex sentences. Before Norman could marry Norris, he had to divorce his fourth wife in order to marry his fifth, because he wanted to legitimize the child they’d had together.

He quickly divorced No. 5 and married Norris, the woman their friends had come to understand was the true love of his life. The one who could tame the Beast.

Asked this week about the period in the early ‘90s when Norman drifted away to other women, Norris was miffed. “He obviously drifted back, didn’t he? What’s more, that’s all so irrelevant now. It was 10 years ago, and we’re together and I don’t see the point.”

Norman remained silent, possibly because he’d taken his hearing aids out and couldn’t hear the discussion.

A Meeting of the Minds in Brentwood

An hour later, Norris is resplendent in a simple swirl of royal purple; Norman in blue blazer, slacks with the shiny silver-tipped cane. They are guests of honor at the Brentwood home of the author and pundit Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, the Westside’s new doyenne of literary/political/social affairs. Norris Mailer’s book is available for purchase at the door.

The L.A. social scene hasn’t been the same since Huffington left her 11-year marriage to billionaire Republican Michael (whose Senate campaign in 1994 against Dianne Feinstein was the most expensive in history) and moved into the spacious, stupendously high-ceilinged house three years ago.

She filled it with books, European objets d’art and cozy overstuffed sofas, and started inviting her considerable array of international acquaintances to dine and discuss. As two formidable cultural critics, whose views rely little on consistency, she and Mailer have much in common. After all, this is the man who long called himself a “left conservative”; and Huffington only recently renounced many of her former right-leaning opinions.

She calls the Mailers longtime friends. “I met then in 1980, when I first moved from London to New York, where they lived. My biography of Maria Callas had just come out, and I was beginning one on Pablo Picasso. Norman has always been fascinated by Picasso and ended up writing a book about him, and so we had these incredible conversations. In fact, Norman was very instrumental in my developing my whole theory of Picasso as a creator and a destroyer.”

And Norris? “She is a wonderful person, with this incredible gift for intimacy. Within a few minutes of knowing her, you feel you want to open up your heart to her. And she has this incredible gift for friendship, too.”

This night, Huffington’s guests are mostly journalists, socialites, designers and staffers for the upcoming Shadow Convention, which Huffington spearheads. It is billed as the thinking person’s alternative to the predictably scripted Democratic and Republican conventions.

Norman Mailer has never heard of the Shadow Convention, he tells a guest, who seems amazed. This is the man who reinvented political-convention coverage with his Esquire essay about John F. Kennedy’s 1960 experience in Los Angeles (“Superman Comes to the Supermarket”) and with his coverage of the 1968 conventions (“Miami and the Siege of Chicago”). He covered the 1996 party conventions for John F. Kennedy Jr.’s George magazine. Is it possible he’s now out of touch?

Perhaps he is just not that interested. The big new book he’s working on is his prime concern, he said. Its subject is secret, even from his wife, although he thinks she may have figured it out “from just being around me.” It is not the long-expected sequel to “Harlot’s Ghost,” which his fans are expecting, but something “totally different that just knocked me on the head.” Norman has also decided that “I don’t know enough about music.” He will venture to the Bayreuth festival in Germany this summer to hear Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

The couple stands apart at the party, but close enough to keep a protective eye on each other. Norman has already packed their bags for an early flight to Seattle. At 8 p.m., Norris leaves for a book signing at the nearby Dutton’s store, where few customers show up.

Back at the party, Norman is saying he leads “a monastic life” when he works, always writing or thinking about it. But how out of touch could he be if he’s already read Harry Potter? When told of a girl who doesn’t like the books because they’re about magic, he tells the mother, “You missed an opportunity here. You should have told her that there is no love without magic.”

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Bettijane Levine can be reached at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.