A Ticket to the Circus (41 page)

I had been showing my paintings at a restaurant/gallery called Central Falls in SoHo, the same place where Edie Vonnegut, my studio mate, showed. It was run by a sweet guy named Bruce Goldstein, and I always did well, usually selling at least half of the paintings.

Me and my painting
Hot Springs.

I’d just taken down a show, and Aurora Huston (née Young), who you’ll remember had been my best friend in college, wrote and asked if I wanted to come to Arkansas and have a show at a gallery she was representing called the Sketch Box in Little Rock. It would be a chance to see my old friends and have some fun, maybe sell some more paintings. Jean Jewell would be there, too. It had been way too long since Aurora, Jean, and I had seen one another.

Aurora.

I packed up all the paintings I had left from the Central Falls show, and Norman, Matt, John, and I went down. Dotson Rader and Pat Lawford also came. They wanted to see Arkansas and were always up for a little adventure. We all stayed at a motel called the Lagniappe, which is Cajun for “a little extra.” At that time, Bill Clinton was in office as governor, and I invited him and Hillary to the opening. We also gave a small dinner for the gallery owners at a Chinese restaurant that the Clintons attended, and Norman got along well with them both, Hillary especially. He later said, “That might be the brightest woman I’ve ever met.” I wasn’t even offended. I had known a long time ago how bright she was. I was delighted that they liked each other, and I
was happy that Bill and I could still be friends. I guess there was a little part of me (maybe not so little) that wanted to show Norman off and let Bill know I was capable of having a relationship with someone who was an intellectual, too, and while I don’t think he was eating his heart out, he was maybe impressed a little. If he was anything, Norman was impressive. But then so are Bill and Hillary. I was so proud of them years later when they gained national prominence, and my New York friends thought I was some kind of psychic genius because I had been telling them for years that a man from Arkansas named Bill Clinton was going to be president one day.

Dotson Rader and me in Arkansas at the Razorback football game.

It was great fun to see them again, to get to know Hillary a little bit, and the show was a big success. A lot of my family came to the opening party, and my mother and my aunt Ella Belle, a teetotaling Assemblies of God Christian who had probably never tasted alcohol in her life, took a glass of champagne off a tray, and she and my mother giggled like two little girls as they tasted it and made sour faces, my father looking on at them with disapproval. Dotson and Pat, who was dressed to the nines in jewelry and designer clothes, mingled and had a great time. Dotson and I sang gospel hymns, as we were prone to do at the
drop of a hat, but down there everyone else knew them, too, so it wasn’t as exotic as it was when we sang at parties in New York. People just thought we were acting a little strange.

Norman loved to tell the story of how one little old blue-haired lady came over to him at the reception and said, “Oh, Mr. Church, you must be so proud of your wife!” He then grumbled that he finally understood why all of his wives complained about being in his shadow.

The Clintons had us over to the governor’s mansion for a drink, and Pat was clearly taken with young Bill. She was nothing if not politically astute, and to her, he was the perfect man to run for president. Pat danced around the subject, easing into it, but finally leaned in and asked him if he thought he might ever run for national office, and he admitted he had thought about it (he’d been thinking about it since he was eight), but it was too early for him. He wanted to work at being governor awhile longer, make contacts, really get things prepared before he made the big jump. (He’d won the governorship in 1978, lost it in 1980, and regained it the previous year, 1982. He went on to serve for ten more years.)

Pat’s green eyes glowed. I could see the wheels already turning,
planning what she was going to do to help him. Pat liked winners, and Bill was clearly a big one. Norman was warming to the subject, too, and the discussion was lively. Then, a uniformed policeman came in and said he was sorry to interrupt us but he had just received an emergency call that Mrs. Lawford’s son had been rushed to the hospital. He didn’t spell out that it was a drug overdose, but there were few other things it could have been. Pat had to leave immediately. She was as angry as I had seen her since the night with Jack Abbott. She turned to all of us, fire shooting out of her green eyes, and said, “If he’s not dead when I get there, I’m going to kill him.” (Fortunately, she called later to say he was all right.)

Me, Norman, and Bill Clinton.

   
TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE
came out in 1984, again to mixed reviews. I always dreaded when a book came out. It seemed to me that most reviewers wanted to kill Norman. With one breath they would say he was our greatest writer, and with the next they would say the book he had just written was crap. He pretended to have rhinoceros hide, but he was hurt by it—of course he was. To devote several years of your life to a book, as he often did, and then have someone who has scarcely read it and who has few credentials rip it apart? It makes one want to do serious damage to the reviewer. (Er, any reviewers reading this are excepted, of course. All of you are lovely.) He still could quote hurtful reviews from decades past, like the one in
Time
, for his second book,
Barbary Shore
: “Paceless, tasteless, and graceless. He is marooned on an intellectual point of no return.” For some reason that one really got to him. When he got the chance to make
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
into a movie, he jumped at it. He needed a break from writing and the judgment of book reviewers. Not that the judgment of Hollywood reviewers was any kinder, but it would be different, at least.

Menahem Golan, of Golan and Globus, an Israeli company, had a lot of money at the time and they were making deals all over the place. One of their deals was with Jean-Luc Godard, for a movie based on Shakespeare’s
King Lear
, and they wanted Norman to write the script. Norman agreed, on the condition that they give him the money to direct
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
as a movie. He had done three underground films (which is a rock-and-roll term for “Norman’s improvised
home movies starring all his friends and family”) back in the sixties, and the time spent making those movies was some of the happiest of his life. Maybe I was just jealous because it was before I came into the picture, but I have never been a fan of those movies, even though he looks cute in them and there are some surprisingly good moments. There are also some embarrassing moments, such as the outfit he wore in
Maidstone
that consisted of cutoff jeans, a leather vest with no shirt, and a top hat. And moments that were pretty horrific, like when Rip Torn whacked him on the head with a hammer. With blood streaming down his head, Norman bit Rip’s ear in retaliation and sent him to the hospital with an infection. It’s a wonder neither one of them was killed.

At any rate, Golan said yes, he could direct
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
, and Norman set to work writing
King Lear
for Godard. It was a disaster from the beginning. At the time he began the project, we were doing a workshop of Norman’s play about Marilyn Monroe,
Strawhead
, at the Actors Studio, with his daughter Kate playing Marilyn and me playing Amy Greene. (It was set during the time when Marilyn lived with Milton and Amy in Connecticut.) Jeannie was in it, and Adele had a small part. It was a real family production. Stephen was one of the stagehands, and Ben Stiller (Jerry Stiller and Annie Meara’s son, before he became the famous Ben Stiller) was running the lights. Godard came to see one of the rehearsals and brought a woman with him who was dressed in leather, furs, and jewels, dripping with European disdain for Americans. Norman had forgotten his glasses that morning, so I was to bring them when I got to rehearsal, but I also forgot them, to Norman’s great annoyance, and I profusely apologized. Godard overheard our conversation and said to his companion, in an arch, suggestive way, “She forgets his glasses because she does not want her husband to see his daughter playing Marilyn Monroe.” It was creepy in the extreme, but we ignored it, as Norman still had to work with him.

Godard and the woman returned to Europe, and Norman worked on the
King Lear
script while we did
Strawhead
at the studio, which was a big success. Kate had been a star in theater at Brown and was incredible as Marilyn. She had studied her walk, her hand gestures, her facial expressions.… She got onstage and
became
Marilyn!
Vanity Fair
had her on the cover as Marilyn, and there were articles about it
everywhere. After that incident, Godard then got the bright idea that he wanted Norman to act in the movie as King Lear, with Kate in the role of Cordelia, Lear’s daughter, except they would be called Norman and Kate Mailer. Already it was getting a bit strange.

Godard flew Norman, Kate, and her present husband, Guy Lancaster, to Switzerland to film, and on the first day it became apparent he wasn’t going to use Norman’s script. He was quite open about the fact that he had never read
King Lear
, either the original by Shakespeare or Norman’s version, and he had no intention of using what Norman had done. Godard’s concept was a King Lear who was a modern-day film director named Norman Mailer, and it soon was obvious that said director was having some kind of unnatural relationship with his daughter. When Godard tried to stage the first scene in a hotel bedroom, Norman was in a rage and said he was not going to do it. He said he would act in a movie if he had a fictitious name and character, but he would not do the things Godard was suggesting using his own name, with his own daughter. He, Kate, and Guy packed their bags and came straight back to the States. Godard immediately called Menahem Golan to complain.

Golan got on the phone with Norman and Godard. Godard was nearly apoplectic that Norman had dared to oppose him as he directed, and Norman said he couldn’t work with a director on
King Lear
who had never read
King Lear.
Golan said, “Is that true, Jean-Luc? That you have not read
King Lear
?” Jean-Luc could have lied and made Norman look bad, but he was too egotistical for that. “I do not HAVE to read
King Lear
!” he said. “I am Jean-Luc Godard!” Menahem threw up his hands. He knew it was hopeless, so the collaboration was over between Mailer and Godard, but Menahem was gentleman enough to allow Norman to direct
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
anyhow.