A Ticket to the Circus (23 page)

The flight to Manila was twenty-two hours long. We got to the airport two hours before we had to. I was discovering Norman’s penchant for being on time, which translated to being early for everything. Before we took any kind of a trip, whether it was halfway around the world or to Provincetown, he would go into his travel mood, which was nervous and angry and crotchety. I tried not to talk to him and risk getting my head taken off. Packing was a huge chore for him, and he was so nervous about being late that we were always early for everything. I learned to take a book along everywhere and just relax. I thought of it as free time, no phones, no kids, just my time to sit and read. Even traveling to Manhattan for dinner got him into a tizzy. I can’t count the times we arrived so early that we had to go looking for a bar in which to have a drink and kill a half hour so we wouldn’t be too early to someone’s house. Once, we arrived and the hostess was in the bathtub.

I told him it must be in his genes, that on the first big trip the Jews
ever took, they got lost and wandered in the desert for forty years, so of course he was afraid of traveling. He didn’t think that observation was quite as funny as I did. Other than that, I never used the Jews as reference for anything, I was pretty sensitive, and he didn’t have a sense of humor about it at all. He wasn’t a practicing Jew religion-wise, and there are those who thought he wasn’t Jewish enough in his writing, but he certainly thought of himself as Jewish. On the other hand, he never missed an opportunity to bring up the Christians—Baptists in particular (as he brought up my mother)—to explain why I did “bad” things. Like one Christmas when I was cooking a turkey and I put tinfoil over it to keep it moist. He thought I should leave it uncovered and baste it every twenty minutes like his mother did, which I wasn’t prepared to do, so I didn’t.

“You’re cooking this turkey like a Christian!” he yelled when he saw I wasn’t going to take off my little tinfoil tent and baste.

“Well, what the fuck holiday do you think this is!” I yelled back. Christmas was always problematic, but more about that later. Now we were on our way to the Philippines, still besotted with love on the long twenty-two-hour flight.

My fear of flying wore off after a while and I stopped listening for pings and getting a pounding heart at each little bump. There was an unending parade of food in our first-class cabin, which Don King had paid for—shrimp and caviar, wine, champagne, ice cream sundaes, dinners of steak or chicken or anything else we wanted. One meal rolled into the next one, chocolates and cookies and nuts passed around by beautiful Filipino stewardesses every few minutes, purple orchids decorating everything. Glutted and exhausted, we finally tried to sleep, and I was delighted that the seats reclined all the way down, so we could lie flat.

There was no chance of snuggling, as there was a console between us, and in his sleep, Norman knocked over a glass of water that dumped right onto my head. I leaped up out of a deep sleep, with my clothes and hair all wet, not knowing what was going on, and I had to dry off as best I could with a towel and then sleep wet. I couldn’t even be mad at him since he didn’t mean to do it, and he felt so bad. Actually, looking back (after I’d dried), it was funny. Kind of. In those days everyone dressed up for flying, and I was wearing the black suit and big black hat
(although I wasn’t sleeping in the hat, of course) that I later wore to meet Michael and Stephen. I was pretty disheveled at the end of the flight, rumpled and bleary-eyed, with my contact lenses gummy from my having slept in them. (They were hard lenses, and meant to be taken out at night. Soft ones hadn’t yet been invented.)

As we stepped off the plane, there were hordes of photographers waiting to snap our pictures. Great. That’s all I needed, with makeup smudged in dark raccoon circles under my eyes, clothes rumpled as if I had slept in them. (Oh. I had.) In the newspapers I looked like the last zombie in a horror movie. At least Norman was wearing something appropriate, a khaki safari jacket and pants that were always wrinkled anyhow, so he looked normal, while my suit and hat were more suitable for a New York winter.

The first person I saw as we entered the airport was Larry Schiller, a photographer who had worked on
Marilyn
with Norman and who would figure in our lives over and over throughout the years. He was hurrying up to us, saying, “Do you need money? I’ve just exchanged a lot of money,” and he handed us a stack of bills for which we traded him dollars.

The hotel was meant to be a tropical paradise; the lobby was full of trees and flowering plants set around a pool. Boxing figures of all kinds were lolling around, drinking pastel drinks with little umbrellas in them. Ken Norton, who later became heavyweight champ, was there, and Larry Holmes, who was Ali’s sparring partner and who also later became champ. I couldn’t get over how big they were in real life, close up. Lazy power came off them, like pumas, even when they were sitting doing nothing. Ken Norton struck up a little conversation with me, and Norman got all chesty and right in the middle of it. Angelo Dundee, Ali’s cornerman, came up, and he and Norman hugged and pounded each other on the back, and I met Bundini Brown, an assistant trainer and cornerman for Ali. Norman knew everyone, it seemed, and they were all interested in his new girlfriend. Don King ambled over smoking a cigar and asked us how the trip had gone. I inched a little closer to Norman. Don had a habit of being particularly huggy with me, and I was wary.

Harold and Mara Conrad were there, too, so it was like old home week. After the Cinnamon Brown night when I’d first met Mara, we
had seen them often, always with a lot of laughs. Mara loved antique-clothing shops and thrift stores, as I did, and we spent a lot of fun times sifting through bins of old sweaters looking for cashmere and rifling racks of chiffon evening dresses from the fifties.

Norman, me, and Don King in the Philippines.

Mara came up to me in the lobby and said, “See that woman over there?” She pointed to a knockout blonde who was nestled in a good-looking man’s arms. “That guy wrapped around her is her husband, who’s in Frazier’s camp, and he’s been here all week screwing everything that’s warm and moving. His wife just arrived today, and as she came in, she announced, ‘The main event is here! You can forget all about the preliminaries!’” Apparently they had a great marriage, and she knew about the other women but didn’t care. I told Norman the story and he loved it. “That’s the kind of woman who really loves her man,” he said. I was appalled.

“What are you saying? That’s the kind of man who doesn’t love his woman!” It really bothered me that he admired that kind of behavior. “You’d never do that to me, would you?”

“No, of course not!” He changed his tune fast. “If I’m going to be with you, I’m going to be true to you. I mean it.” He was so sincere,
those blue eyes piercing right into me. I believed him. Even though he had a track record six miles long, I really thought we had too much going between us for him to risk ruining it. He wanted to change. He sincerely wanted me, just me, he kept telling me over and over. I was twenty-six and I would be young and sexy forever. Well, at least I would forever be twenty-six years younger than him.

The days were backward to the time in New York—midnight was at noon—and we slept all day and stayed up all night. Ali and Frazier trained all night, as it was better they worked on the schedule their bodies were used to. We didn’t even try to change our schedules. We just found new ways to amuse ourselves all night. Norman got hold of some body paint and painted my body like a weird Helmut Newton African tattooed woman or something, and took pictures. Then I painted him, and finally we had the fun of washing it off in the shower. We were like two naughty kids, up all night playing, but we still managed to get up during the day and do a few tourist things as well.

Norman had been in the Philippines during the war, and the government gave us a car and driver to take us out into the bush to see if we could find the spot where he had bivouacked. He thought he remembered exactly where it was, as he had been in the reconnaissance unit. We headed out of Manila, with our driver, in a huge stretch limo on a beautifully paved four-lane highway, but a few miles outside the city the pavement simply ended and we hit the dirt with a hard whump! And then we were on a narrow little pig trail through the jungle. Broad leaves slapped the windows and sides of the car as we drove through, and children appeared and disappeared in the dense foliage. People hung out of houses made of bamboo and reed that were up on stilts, grass mats rolled up and hanging over the windows. They had probably never had a big black limousine come crashing through their neighborhood before, and I’m sure it was terrifying. I had never felt so much like a rich American in my life. I wanted to duck down and hide from the faces peering in the window. I wanted to say to them, “This is not who I am! I’m really not rich at all! This is a borrowed car!” I was ashamed to be there, riding in such a car, while the people hardly had enough clothes to cover their bodies.

Finally, we rolled into an open field that had a large tree in the center of it, and we got out. Norman thought it might be the same place
they had bivouacked thirty years before, but even if it wasn’t, it was a tree much like one he remembered, and in the spirit of the occasion, we pulled out a picnic basket, spread a cloth on the grass, and had a picnic under the tree that once had (maybe) sheltered a young Norman Mailer when he was hatching the plot for
The Naked and the Dead.

Belinda Ali was a big, beautiful woman who looked like the female version of Muhammad Ali. She and Muhammad had gotten married eight years before, when she was a virginal seventeen, and they had four children, but she was not the woman he had with him at the fight. That was another beautiful, tall, thin woman named Veronica Porsche. He had been going around introducing Veronica as his wife to everyone, including the press, and it got into the papers in the States. He was a womanizer, and I’m sure Belinda knew the score about him. (Although I wouldn’t swear to it. It’s amazing how wives can not know what’s going on under their very noses. I know this the hard way.) But this was too much for her to ignore. He was introducing Veronica as his
wife.

Word got out that Belinda was on her way to Manila. Norman and I were supposed to go over to meet the champ that night, so we were waiting to see what was going to happen with Belinda. Belinda flew the twenty-two hours to get there, and I would imagine she slept little. She was driven to the hotel from the airport. She closeted herself with Muhammad for about thirty minutes. It could have been longer. I can’t remember exactly, and we heard from someone who was outside the room that she was screaming at the top of her lungs every minute she was there. Then she went back to the airport and flew the twenty-two hours back to America. This all happened the day before the fight.

Nobody told us not to go for our meeting with Ali, so we showed up and were ushered into his suite. The air felt thick and heavy. It was an effort to breathe. He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, like the king on a throne. Veronica was there, wearing a long, beautiful white caftan, walking back and forth, wandering, seeming not to know what to do with herself. In the background, a screen had been set up and an old Ronald Reagan movie was playing,
The Killers
, with Angie Dickinson, where Ronnie plays a bad guy and Angie plays a femme fatale. We sat on the couch with several other people, his trainers and handlers and assistants, nobody speaking, as if we were waiting for some play to begin.

A group of children came in. I’m not sure where they were from, but in my memory they had on school uniforms. Ali took the time to say hello to each of them, perched each one on his knee, and gave them a personal message, like “You have beautiful eyes,” or “You’re going to be a fighter one day, with muscles like that.” On it went. We didn’t say a word. We watched Ronnie and Angie scramble over rocks, have a shoot-out with someone. Ronnie got hit and died. Then the kids left, and there were still a lot of us in the room waiting, looking to Ali expectantly to say something, to give us words of wisdom.

He took a tired, deep breath and began a sermon, one about the different kinds of hearts. Veronica paced behind him, back and forth, back and forth. “There is the heart of paper,” he began in a quiet voice. “It is beautiful, but soft, and the rains of despair beat on it and weaken it until it is nothing but a shapeless mass of sodden waste. There is the heart of glass, beautiful but cold, and although the sun shines through it, making it light up the corners of a dismal room, it is fragile, and the winds of evil blow it over and it crashes into a thousand shards.…” He went on… and on… about the different kinds of hearts, and we all worked to keep our eyes open. I pinched myself, bit my lip, did every trick I knew to keep awake, but I didn’t succeed too well, and Norman just about managed to keep looking interested. It was hot in the room, and dark. Perfect for taking a little snooze. The soft voice went on for another hour, more maybe, but finally he was done and someone gave the signal that we were all to leave.