A Ticket to the Circus (34 page)

PHOTOGRAPH BY JILL KREMENTZ

   
NORMAN WAS THE
one who called my parents and told them I was pregnant. I just couldn’t do it. Of course, they were upset. Having a child out of wedlock was still a big deal in Arkansas in those days. Girls were “in trouble” and looked down on if the man wouldn’t marry them. Everyone still counted on their fingers if the baby came too soon after the wedding, and abortion was illegal. But in New York, it was getting to be not such a big deal at all. Movie stars had babies out of wedlock all the time. Even the term “out of wedlock” was beginning to sound quaint. Even so, Norman Mailer having his eighth child with the sixth woman, to whom he wasn’t married, still caused a flurry in the papers. There was a picture of Norman and me in
People
magazine at some party where the photographer had gotten down on the floor to get the best angle of my burgeoning belly, and of course everyone back home saw it. My parents were so ashamed. But Norman told
Mother and Daddy he loved me and he was going to marry me, and then he set about trying to do it.

The first thing he did was call Beverly, who at that time was living in Provincetown all year, and tell her he wanted to talk. She came to town, and Norman went downstairs to sit in the car with her and tell her about the baby and say that he finally wanted to get a divorce. I don’t know why it was such a surprise. They hadn’t lived together in eight years. Norman hadn’t pushed her for a divorce before, he said, in spite of Carol having Maggie, because he’d known how ugly it would get, so he had just let things drift along as they were. Now he wanted to sort it all out and start afresh.

Beverly totally flipped out, and as he told me when he came back upstairs a little shaken, she had nearly run over him when he’d gotten out of the car. In Norman’s telling, he’d leaned back in through the window to say something and she’d gunned the motor and driven off. He said he’d pulled his head out of the car just in time to keep from being decapitated. That started a legal battle that lasted for nearly three years. Of course, the newspapers and magazines were full of it, and since it was all being done on the Cape, we were constantly going back and forth to Barnstable.

Al Morrison’s prediction about financial reversals proved to be accurate, too. We had seven children in private school or college, not to mention three alimonies, and had gotten so behind on our taxes that the IRS had taken a lien on the Provincetown house. Beverly considered it to be
her
house, and no matter what the IRS said, she was adamant that it would go to her in the settlement—along with the Brooklyn apartment and everything else Norman owned. She was basically asking for us to be out on the street with nothing. And 1978 was just around the corner, hanging over our heads. Well, over my head, since no one else knew about the prediction.

Norman had started working on a project with Larry Schiller about Gary Gilmore, the Utah convict who had murdered two people and been sentenced to death. He was the first person executed after ten years of a moratorium on executions in the United States, the first since 1958 in Utah. Gilmore had refused to appeal the decision, which caused a furor in the courts and the press, as no one had ever done that before. His attitude was, “You sentenced me to death. I’ve been accepting
sentences all my life, I didn’t realize I had a choice. Now you have to carry it out.” The press was full of it. He was on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
and in every paper in every state. Gary Gilmore was shot to death on January 17, 1977, and Schiller had the rights to the story.

We were in Provincetown for a winter weekend not long after Gary had been executed, when Larry called and said he wanted Norman to write it. Larry had already done an incredible amount of work, securing rights to stories, doing interviews, and now Norman started going back and forth to Utah, meeting and interviewing Gary’s uncle Vern and aunt Ida, his cousin Brenda and her husband Johnny, and all the lawyers and the families of the victims. I accompanied him to Utah a few times; we went skiing in the spring, and I finally managed to get down a mountain, not prettily, but without half killing myself, though after I got pregnant in July, I stayed in New York most of the time when he went.

With money so tight, I gave up my Willow Street apartment. I didn’t mind, really, but my apartment had been a little place of refuge Matt and I had had that I now missed. With both Michael and Stephen living with us, the place was just too small. The boys were lively young teenagers, being pulled between their mother and father in the divorce, and they often took out their frustrations on Matt, who was so much younger. It was not a good time in our lives. I loved the boys, but had to protect my small son from their bullying. I don’t think they ever really hurt him, but he was creative and sensitive, and they would sometimes do things like snatch away a drawing he was working on and tear it up, make fun of his Southern accent, or break his toys, which broke my heart.

The noise level was high most of the time, with music or the guitar or loud voices. Their friends were over a lot, and I couldn’t keep them from climbing around the apartment. Once, Stephen and some of his friends were jumping into the hammock, ignoring my yelling at them to stop it, and one of the girls fell and hit her head. I rushed over to her, lying on the floor, and she looked up at me, smiled, and said, “I remember you. You were in my dream.” Alarmed, I called her parents, who came and took her to the hospital, and she was ultimately fine, but my nerves were pretty shot, I have to say. I worried about what would happen when the baby arrived.

We had another addition to the circus at this time as well, Judith McNally, who became Norman’s secretary and worked for him until her death in 2005. His previous secretary, Molly, and he had parted company, and it had not been amicable. She and her partner, Mary, who did Norman’s typing, had decided they didn’t like the Gary Gilmore project and had refused to work on it, so Norman had had to hire outside researchers and typists (while still paying Molly’s and Mary’s weekly salaries). That couldn’t go on for long. Molly resented me as well, and went out of her way to let me know it. For example, if we were going on a trip, she would make Norman’s airline reservation but not mine, so I had to call on my own and try to get on the same flight in a seat next to him. The final straw came when he had to go to California, and Molly, annoyed at him about something, routed him through Dallas, which had a three-hour layover, instead of booking a direct flight. He didn’t check his ticket until he got to Dallas, and he inquired if there had been direct flights available. Of course there were. There were direct flights to L.A. from New York practically every hour. He called her from the airport and fired her, and she immediately wrote herself a check for the balance of his bank account, which was about three thousand dollars—not a vast amount, but real money for us in those days. And then she took a hammer and destroyed all the office equipment.

After that debacle, I tried to help him as much as I could. I took over paying the bills and other minutiae of running his life, a lot of which I was already doing—which might have been part of the problem with Molly. But the new Gilmore project, which he was calling
The Executioner’s Song
, was too vast and he needed a full-time secretary and research assistant badly. He put a blind item in
The Village Voice
, “Well-known author seeks amanuensis.”

“That’ll weed out half of the people who have no idea what an amanuensis is, and the others will either look it up, which is good, or will already know, which is better.” He received a big stack of résumés from
The Village Voice
post office box, we weeded them down to about ten or twelve, and called the finalists, who came in for interviews. A couple of them were possibilities, most were marginal, and one was simply unbelievable. She was a hefty blonde (a color found nowhere in nature) and she came for the interview wearing a low-cut short skin-tight black dress with black fishnet stockings and red spike-heeled
shoes. This was just before Christmas, and I was already pretty big in the belly. I answered the doorbell, took one look at her, she looked at me, and she knew she had done the wrong thing. The interview didn’t last long, that’s for sure. Then, when we were about to despair, Judith McNally rang the bell. She was wearing a tidy gray wool suit with a little robin’s-egg-blue blouse. Her long brown hair was pulled back into a bun. She was smart and thin and as crisp as a new package of crackers. And she lived only two blocks from us. She was perfect.

So the household was formed. In the daytime, Judith worked down in the little office on the floor below our apartment, Norman rented a studio down the street, and Myrtle was with us most days. Michael, Stephen, and Matt were in school, so it was quiet during the day, but at night it was chaos. The situation with Michael and Stephen wasn’t improving, and I couldn’t seem to get through to them. Norman didn’t back me up at all. In fact, he was annoyed that I couldn’t handle them, and blamed me for their misbehavior. It got to the point where something had to give.

I’ve always been able to express myself better in writing, and it seemed like nothing I said to Michael and Stephen had any effect, so I wrote them a heartfelt letter, asking them to be kinder to Matt and telling them how much I loved them and what good big brothers they could be to him if they only tried. I said they should try to look at it from his point of view. He had been taken from his home when he was three, where he’d been an only child, and brought to a place where he was one of eight children and his two older brothers teased him mercilessly. He was teased at school because he was dyslexic, and then teased at home. He was miserable, and I couldn’t do anything to protect him.

I really think the letter helped. They hadn’t seen themselves as being that bad, and to their credit they felt awful. Norman certainly thought the letter helped. Although nothing could dampen their energy and exuberance, I think they were kinder to Matt after that and stopped teasing him quite so much.

The trapeze hanging from the skylight rafter was one huge problem, though. It was right in front of the kitchen, and one boy or the other was always swinging through the house on it. I had to time my entrances and exits to the kitchen so I wouldn’t be crashed into by a flying boy. Then one day, as Stephen was standing up on the trapeze bar
in his socks, pumping, flying higher and wilder, he slipped off and flew into the air for real, crashed, and went skidding all the way across the living room floor. I dropped a cup of tea I was holding and ran to him, but he was fine, just shaken and bruised a bit.

Shortly after that, one of the ropes on the trapeze broke, fortunately not while someone was standing up on it. We never put it back up again. The tightrope had long been put away. And the rule about no friends jumping into the hammock was strictly enforced. It was just too dangerous. Finally, Beverly moved from Provincetown to Brooklyn Heights, a block away from us, and Stephen lived with her most of the time. Then Michael eventually went to Andover to boarding school. Now Michael and Stephen are my dearest loves and I don’t know what I would do without them. Michael even produced Matt’s first film,
The Money Shot
, and they have great affection for each other.

Matt on the trapeze.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JILL KREMENTZ

“Matt is so talented,” Michael said while they were filming. “He’s a great filmmaker.”

“Mike’s always there for me. He’s a great producer,” Matt said.

“Who are these people?” I said. Everyone is a teenager once, and everyone grows up.

Judith had been on the job just a few weeks when she came in one morning looking considerably different. We had slowly been getting to know each other, and I like to think there’s nobody I can’t talk to, from hillbillies to presidents, but she was hard to decipher. She was intensely private about her life, and while she did say she was single and lived alone, she had a boyfriend. Her usual office attire was something a little drab and colorless. Her hair had been a wren’s-nest-brown, and she wore no makeup on her pale Irish skin. She was efficient and did her work with the minimum of talk, and while they weren’t buddies, Norman had respect for her, and they were beginning to find their relationship.

I don’t know what possessed her to make the change on this particular morning, but I sat up in my chair and almost spit out my coffee, because in walked Judith, with her long hair dyed a brilliant shade of red, best described as “
carnevale
,” and she was wearing Day-Glo pink spandex pants and a tight sequined T-shirt. She had painted her long fake nails a neon green, and her makeup matched the ensemble.

“Judith? Is that you?” Norman came out of the kitchen to stare, too.

“Well, I thought it was time to let you see the real me. I’ve started managing my boyfriend’s group, and I’ve had to start looking the part.” It was hilarious to hear Judith’s precise, tidy voice coming out of the woman standing in front of us. Her boyfriend was in a duo that performed in punk rock clubs, and she had become part of that world. I can’t remember if it was Judith who introduced us to Legs McNeil, a writer who started a magazine called
PUNK
, and coined the term for the music of the eighties. It might have been Martha Thomasas, another applicant for the secretarial job, whom Norman hired on a part-time basis for research, but we were soon introduced to a different kind of crowd.