Literary Rogues (23 page)

The 1960s, however, came and went, and the Merry Pranksters barely registered on the cultural radar when compared to the Beat generation before them. Rock music was the defining medium for the rebellious young messengers of the 1960s and 1970s. Like all other youth movements, the hippies were tied to a generation in a specific time and place, and they grew up.

“I
used to think we were going to win
in the sixties,” Kesey said. “Nixon went out and I thought we won.” Even with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and Nixon's disgraced exit from the White House the previous year, the U.S. government's drug war continued. Free love did not transform the world.

Ginsberg passed away from complications of liver cancer on April 5, 1997, exactly three years to the day after the death of another generation's spokesperson, Kurt Cobain. Kesey died in 2001, also the result of liver cancer. “
We're only a small number
and never with the popular vote,” Kesey said in 1992, reflecting upon the counterculture. “We have to keep this little flame going and pass it on. All it takes is one person.”

“
I'm an alcoholic
. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.”

—
TRUMAN CAPOTE

E
ager to make friends with his literary elders, novelist
Norman Mailer
(1923–2007) invited Dorothy Parker over to his place to meet his pregnant wife and their dog, a ferocious German shepherd named Karl. Parker was a fan of
The Naked and the Dead
, Mailer's debut novel that fictionalized his World War II experience. The book was an enormous critical and commercial success for its twenty-five-year-old author, selling two hundred thousand copies within three months of its publication in 1945. “
Part of me thought it was
possibly the greatest book written since
War and Peace
. On the other hand I also thought, ‘I don't know anything about writing. I'm virtually an impostor,' ” Mailer said.

Parker visited the young writer at his Los Angeles home one afternoon. Their meeting went awry when Mailer's German shepherd took one sniff of Parker's dog and flew into a frenzy, frightening both the timid dog and its owner. Parker appears to have taken the dog's aggressiveness personally and referred to Mailer years later as “
that awful man who stabbed
his wife”—an incident we'll get to shortly.

Parker wasn't Mailer's only critic. Reviewers attacked his second and third novels for not living up to the promise of
The Naked and the Dead
. This didn't stop Mailer from being commercially successful and winning fans in high places: his sexually progressive third novel,
The Deer Park
, reportedly had a cherished place on President Kennedy's nightstand.

Mailer drifted through New York and New England in the early 1950s. He tried using marijuana to stimulate his creativity, and wouldn't write without first using a can of beer to “
prime the pump
.” He was running—from himself, from his critics, and from his troubled marriage (which ended in divorce in 1952). In an effort to refocus his energy on his writing, Mailer would eventually cut back his alcohol consumption and stopped smoking pot altogether. Like Hemingway, Mailer loved drinking, but he loved writing even more.

He remarried and settled in New York City in 1955, where he cofounded the
Village Voice
, an alternative newspaper. He used his new platform to become an outspoken cultural critic and journalist. Mailer was infamous for getting drunk at the annual
Voice
holiday party and punching out some unsuspecting sucker. It seemed that “
not a weekend went by
that Mailer wasn't in the news for punching someone in an expensive Manhattan restaurant,” Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Glenn Schaeffer later remarked. “Word was he even trained for these bouts.” Mailer was willing to take on anyone anytime—with words or with fists. He was a throwback to the literary lions of the Lost Generation, whose egos were as big as their books.

By 1960, twelve years had passed since Mailer's literary debut. Now a tenured fixture of the American literary scene, Mailer had taken to hosting raucous literary parties with his second wife, Adele, where he and his male writer friends would get falling-down drunk.

One time, after asking a model for her number within earshot of his wife, Mailer was treated to a strip show. Adele, furious at the model (Alice Denham, later a
Playboy
playmate and novelist), ripped her own shirt off. “
Take off your clothes
and we'll see who's the best woman,” Adele said. “You think Norman's up for grabs?”

Soon a crowd gathered around the two women. Mailer, egging his wife on, began stripping his own clothes off. Eventually both he and Adele were stark naked. Denham, refusing to strip for free (she was a professional, after all), left with her date. “At least it ought to be
a good night for you two
,” she said to the Mailers on her way out.

“
I tried to remember what
the world-famous novelist, Norman Mailer, looked like naked,” Denham later wrote. “Norman was just square, no particular waist or pectoral definition, sturdy legs large at the knees, an ordinary penis, scared balls trying to hide.”

Their parties wouldn't always end with such a jovial fashion show. In the waning hours of a party on November 19, 1960, Mailer drunkenly stabbed his wife in the upper abdomen and back with a penknife. After she lay bleeding for three hours, partygoers finally realized how serious her wound was and took her to a hospital. Mailer was arrested.

When he was released on bail, he went straight to his wife's hospital bed and begged her not to press charges. He couldn't support her and their two children if he was a convict, he pleaded. Who would want the writings of a felon? he asked her. She accepted his argument and refused to sign the felony assault complaint. Prosecutors indicted him in January, however, and Mailer pled guilty to third-degree assault two months later.

Mailer received a suspended sentence and probation; Adele separated from him later that month and they divorced two years later. “
You don't know anything about a woman
until you meet her in court,” Mailer said. In total, he would be married six times.

He was, despite his flaws, a sought-after commodity on the bachelor market. “He's
a tremendously sexy man
,” magazine editor Marion Magid said. “I'm part of the generation that had a crush on Mailer—like JFK in a way. He's fascinating in spite of everything. There's a deep sweetness in him, sort of like Sinatra—you love him anyway in spite of all the awful things he may have done.”

With nine children to his name, it shouldn't be a surprise that Mailer was an avowed “
enemy of birth control
.” He frequently came head to head with feminists for his outspoken (and sometimes unpopular) opinions. Mailer once said that he doubted there would be “
a really exciting
woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.”

But it wasn't just women whom Mailer tangled with. He once bit off part of actor Rip Torn's ear on a movie set after Torn, taking his role opposite Mailer a little too seriously,
attacked him with a hammer
in a moment of improvisation. Mailer's wife (one of his wives, at least) had to physically separate them. Mailer also loved to mix it up with critics and took to assuming a boxing crouch upon meeting them. Still, his contemporary, Gore Vidal, said, “
He is a man whose faults
, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”

The highly volatile and controversial Mailer was a regular guest on television talk shows. “
He could reliably be counted on
to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not,” the
New York Times
wrote in its obituary of Mailer. Perhaps the only other literary guest of the era that talk show producers could rely on for such savory sound bites was
Truman Capote
(1924–1984). “
I like to talk on TV
about those things that aren't worth writing about,” Capote allegedly said.

Mailer and Capote both made splashy publishing debuts in 1948, though neither looked the other up right away. “
I've always been solitary
,” Mailer said. “I've felt it's bad practice for your work to join a group—what you gain in companionship you lose in the power to think independently.” Still, he was on friendly terms with Capote, and if they didn't quite form a group, they at least made an odd couple: Mailer was in the running to challenge Ernest Hemingway for the title of Straightest Man in the World, while the flamboyant Capote had never made any attempts to hide his homosexuality.

When they went drinking together in Brooklyn Heights one night, they stopped into a working-class Irish bar where the men sitting at the bar were tough, world-weary Irishmen. “
Truman was wearing a little
gabardine cape,” Mailer recalled. “He strolled in looking like a beautiful little faggot prince.” Mailer walked several steps behind Capote, as if he didn't know the man. He was worried a fight was going to break out, but the bar's patrons ignored them.

Mailer was forever in awe of Capote's bravery (or stupidity, as it may have been). Capote was, in Mailer's words, “
a ballsy little guy
.” After Capote published the novella
Breakfast at Tiffany's
in 1958, Norman Mailer generously praised Capote as “
the most perfect writer of my generation
.”

From an early age, Capote pursued celebrity, riches, and pleasure. “
I had to be successful
, and I had to be successful early,” he said in 1978. “I was a very special person, and I had to have a very special life. I was not meant to work in an office or something, though I would have been successful at whatever I did. But I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I wanted to be rich and famous.”

There were clues in his early life that he was destined to be a writer. Before he even started school, the Louisiana native taught himself to read and write. He carried around a dictionary and notepad at the age of five, and started writing fiction six years later. “
I began writing really sort of
seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day, and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it,” he later recalled.

He also befriended a neighbor girl, Nelle Harper Lee. Both shared an interest in books. Capote cut an odd and effeminate character even as a child—his dream was to be a tap dancer—and
Lee protected him from bullies
. She and Capote were lifelong friends; Lee later based a character in her only novel,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, on him.

Capote's debut novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, was a critical and commercial success upon publication in 1948. He was just twenty-three years old. Though Capote would later escape his southern roots,
Other Voices
owed a debt to southern gothic writers such as William Faulkner. The novel's homosexual subject matter was mildly controversial for the 1940s, and the
Library Journal
warned libraries from ordering it for this reason.

The author photo on the dust jacket of
Other Voices
, taken a year earlier by Harold Halma, caused almost as much controversy as the book itself. In the infamous photo, Capote is reclining and staring seductively at the camera. One critic commented that Capote looked “
as if he were dreamily
contemplating some outrage against conventional morality.” While Capote liked to feign that the camera had caught him off-guard, he had, in fact, meticulously posed himself; the reaction from the public and the press was exactly what he intended.

Capote visited London on his book tour, where he met Cecil Beaton, a fashion photographer twenty years his elder. “
I feel anxious that Truman
may not survive to make old bones,” Beaton wrote at the time in a diary entry. “I am slightly scared that someone who lives so intensely may be packing in a short span more than many people are capable of enjoying or experiencing in a long lifetime.” Capote next went to France, where, if he is to be believed, he slept with his French editor—none other than the French existential novelist Albert Camus.

Capote's undisputed masterpiece is the 1965 book
In Cold Blood
, a “nonfiction novel” based on the murder of a Kansas farm family. The story was originally an assignment for
The New Yorker
and took years to research. His old friend Harper Lee assisted him. She was instrumental to the story, because the Kansas townspeople initially gave Capote the cold shoulder. He was a strange character. He couldn't tolerate the presence of yellow roses, “
which is sad, because
they're my favorite flower,” he once said. He refused hotel rooms whose numbers added up to unlucky numbers, and he would not, under any circumstances, get onto a plane with two nuns. With Lee's assistance, the townsfolk warmed up to Capote and his quirks.