The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (31 page)

The march, as David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin had envisioned it, would start with a mass rally at the Lincoln Memorial and then work its
way across the Potomac via the Arlington Bridge to the Pentagon. A short rally would be held, with speeches from dignitaries such as Noam Chomsky and Benjamin Spock, followed by the blockade of the building and an “exorcism” of the Pentagon led by Abbie Hoffman.

But the crowd that day was bigger than the organizers had anticipated— some news reports estimated that as many as 250,000 had traveled to Washington for the march—which meant that the relatively short distance from the memorial to the Pentagon would take hours and require reserves of patience and fortitude. Mailer, marching in his dark blue pinstripe suit on the front lines along with Lowell, Chomsky, Macdonald, and Goodman, sensed unease and restlessness in the atmosphere:

The huge mass disgorged itself in the Pentagon’s North Parking lot, an area so “large and empty that any army would have felt small in its expanse.” A festival-like atmosphere fell upon the gathering, and the formal invocation to exorcise the Pentagon of its demons had begun in earnest with spontaneous chants of “Out, demons, out!” Mailer found himself whispering the words almost in spite of himself. He was emboldened and heartened by this display of wild, seditious energy. Now was the time to transgress whatever police barricade he could find and get himself arrested, before he had to endure any more boring polemics. In
a grassy area between the lot and the Pentagon, he found two ranks of military police spaced about ten yards apart standing in front of a low-hanging rope. With little fanfare Mailer climbed over the rope and walked almost directly into the waiting arms of a couple of officers. “Mailer had the guts to get himself arrested when a lot of other celebrities at the march didn’t,” said Ed de Grazia. “The idea was not only to demonstrate but to put your body on the line as well, and he did that.”

Nonplussed, with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit, Mailer was led into a Volkswagen camper that drove him to an army truck filled with other protestors, but none of his marching comrades were present, no Lowell or Macdonald. The plan had been for everyone to get arrested, and make news. Had they copped out at the last minute?

Mailer and his vanmates were next corralled onto a yellow school bus, which brought them to a post office that would be used as a makeshift holding pen for the protestors. At one point, an unusually rabid protestor started hurling horrid epithets in Mailer’s direction, yelling “You Jew bastard” repeatedly, to which Mailer dished it right back, with a few “dirty Krauts” thrown in for good measure. If he was going to offer himself as a prize prisoner on the altar of justice, he was damn sure going to defend himself with both fists cocked.

Most of the detainees were processed through quickly, with small fines and a promise not to engage in any protest activities near the Pentagon for six months. With $200 in his pocket, Mailer began to hand out bail money to the kids who were broke. While the others were arraigned and released, Mailer remained, and his hopes of making the New York dinner party dimmed. “In jail,” he wrote, “a man who wished to keep his sanity, must never anticipate, never expect, never hope with such high focus of hope that disappointment would be painful. Because there was no place for disappointment to go in prison, except back into one’s cells. Prison was frustration.”

After interminably tedious hours of waiting, word came down that Mailer would be processed not in Washington but in a workhouse in Occoquan, Virginia. Here he was given a ratty cot on which to sleep, but the bright lights obviated any chance of rest. Joining Mailer in Occoquan were Noam Chomsky, Tuli Kupferberg, a fixture of the Greenwich Village underground and co-leader of the Fugs, a folk-rock agitprop group that had played in the Pentagon parking lot during the rally, and David
Dellinger. “He was being treated worse than anyone else in jail,” said Kupferberg of Mailer’s incarceration. “They kept him to the last to be arraigned, so he had to wait an extra day, and it was obvious they were gonna make an example of him. No one was urging Norman to stay. Very few people were gonna stay, and I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

Kupferberg refused to cop a plea, which would have resulted in a five-day suspended sentence; it was too convenient, he reasoned, and would make his arrest seem like the obligatory gesture of an antiwar dilettante. Mailer was struck by Kupferberg’s depth of commitment; perhaps his arrest too could become something more meaningful than a hollow symbolic gesture. He decided to plead guilty as well. He would not give himself up and thus confirm for himself the doubts that had dogged him from the very beginning of his engagement with the antiwar movement—that he was a middle-aged man with middle-class values, a writer who could articulate the rage of the outlaw in his writing but couldn’t become an outlaw himself.

Despite a nolo contendere plea, Mailer’s sentence was the harshest yet meted out to the public figures that participated in the march: thirty days, of which twenty-five would be suspended. That meant five days in jail. A hastily handwritten appeal was immediately filed, and after much wrangling with the public prosecutor, Mailer was released on his own recognizance.

The arrest had been a crucible for Mailer, a test of his own resolve to fight the power, but in the end, he was resigned to his role as belletrist rebel. Even Jerry Rubin had to admit that “there was a part of me that knew he would have lost his effectiveness if he’d become a Yippie. Norman was better being Norman Mailer.”

Mailer didn’t go to Washington with a specific magazine assignment, but when he returned to New York it occurred to him that there was a story to be written, perhaps a major piece. He called Midge Decter, the executive editor of
Harper’s
, and asked her if she would be interested in something. Mailer and Decter’s relationship dated back to the late forties.
Commentary
, the liberal politics and arts monthly created by Decter’s husband, Norman Podhoretz, in 1945, had raved about both
The Naked and the Dead
and
The Deer Park
, and Mailer had contributed occasional pieces to the magazine since the early sixties.

Harper’s
editor, thirty-two-year-old Willie Morris, had become the
youngest editor in chief in the magazine’s 117-year history in 1967 when John Fischer resigned over a dispute with publisher John Cowles over the magazine’s finances. A native of Jackson, Mississippi, and a Rhodes Scholar, Morris was a writer (his memoir
North Toward Home
was published to great critical acclaim in 1967) and an editing prodigy. He landed his first publishing job in 1960, as editor of the muckraking biweekly
Texas Observer
, at the age of twenty-five.

Morris and Decter, along with senior editor Bob Kotlowitz, had quickly transformed
Harper’s
from a sleepy and irrelevant literary monthly (“as fuddy-duddy a magazine as you could imagine,” said Decter) into a lively and essential forum for arts and political coverage, with contributions from such writers as David Halberstam, Elizabeth Hardwick, Neil Sheehan, Alfred Kazin, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Irwin Shaw, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. Mailer knew he would be in good company, and Decter was thrilled that Mailer had thought of the magazine. Morris, who had first met Mailer in Austin in 1961 when was editing the
Texas Observer
, felt Mailer was “in many ways a literary genius,” and he was equally as enthusiastic about bedecking the revamped
Harper’s
with Mailer’s byline. There had been past attempts by Morris to get Mailer to contribute to the magazine during his tenure as associate editor, but Mailer’s fee was too exorbitant, and John Fischer had never been a fan. When Morris argued vociferously for
Harper’s
to publish an excerpt from Mailer’s 1966 anthology
Cannibals and Christians
, Fischer rejected it.

Now that the opportunity to publish Mailer had again presented itself, there was no way Morris was going to let the writer walk. Morris sensed this would be a watershed piece, “one that would strike to the taproots of all that was happening at that moment in the nation.” In order to get Mailer his rate without forcing
Harper’s
to pay an exorbitant amount, Mailer’s agent, Scott Meredith, had the idea to sell the Pentagon story as a book as well. Mailer would be given a wide berth to write long, perhaps twenty thousand words, more than enough to justify a smallish but timely title.

Morris and Decter arranged meetings with a number of publishers. When the editor in chief of Macmillan had the temerity to ask Decter about the sales figures for
Why Are We in Vietnam?
the meeting was peremptorily cut short. Meredith eventually handled the sale of the book for $25,000 to Bob Gutwillig at New American Library;
Harper’s
would pay $10,000 for the article, a fifty-cents-a-word bargain. But Mailer would have to move fast; NAL didn’t want to sit on a book whose subject matter would go stale in a few months’ time, and
Harper’s
needed to close their issue in less than eight weeks. The story, it was agreed, would run in the February 1968 issue.

The money was in place, but Morris had yet to have a single conversation with Mailer, who, according to Meredith, was in seclusion at his beach house in Provincetown. It was a trick of fate that found Mailer, who was accompanied by the boxer Jose Torres, face-to-face with Morris one afternoon on the corner of Forty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue near the Algonquin Hotel, where Morris was having drinks with a reporter from the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
.

Two weeks later, Morris received a phone call from Mailer. The story was getting long; he would need more time. The February issue wasn’t tenable now; Morris would try to run it in March instead, with a final printer’s deadline of January 10.

The writing came slowly at first. Mailer’s reporting at the Pentagon was circumscribed by his role as a participant; any pretense of a full-scale accounting of the event was out the question. He was unsure about the tone and scale of the piece; what was required was a deeper understanding of the counterculture’s political landscape, the inner workings of the various factions and how they responded to each other. From his assistant Sandy Charlebois, an activist and insider who had spent a fair amount of time with the Diggers’ Emmett Grogan in San Francisco and had helped create the name “Yippies” with Rubin and Hoffman, Mailer received deep background on the origins of street theater as political outreach. Mailer dispatched Charlebois to interview Rubin extensively, and Mailer himself grilled Paul Krassner, Dellinger, and other participants in the Pentagon march.

Given the ambitious scope of the project at hand, Mailer’s domestic situation provided a constant source of distraction. His already parlous relationship with his wife, actress Beverly Bentley, was disintegrating
into violent bouts of recriminatory, boozy verbal strafing. At one point during the writing process, Beverly claimed that Mailer had performed voodoo on her stereo system because the needle had unaccountably dropped off when he had left the house one night. “You’re evil!” she screamed. The piece, Mailer recalled, “was written in a towering depression. I did it in two months and those were some of the worst weeks of my life. I would come home each night and think it was terrible.”

After attempting a number of approaches, Mailer as a last resort tried the third person; the “I” would become a character called Norman Mailer. Even then, he wasn’t confident that it was the right way, but it carried him deeper into the story than he had managed thus far. After ten thousand words and a great many bouts of self-reproach, he was convinced it was clicking.

Writing about yourself in the third person, particularly within the context of nonfiction, was a rare and highly eccentric device to use in 1967, but it had a distinctive literary precedent. Journalist Henry Adams—the grandson of John Quincy Adams, the son of a U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, and a Harvard graduate who would teach medieval history at the university—rejected in 1877 the appurtenances of privilege and title that had been his birthright to devote himself to extensive travel and a rigorous, years-long study of American history, the centerpiece of which was a nine-volume history of America under the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. But it wasn’t until Adams sat down to record the events of his own life that he forged an unprecedented approach to historiography—fusing social criticism with larger historical currents in the form of a memoir.
The Education of Henry Adams
was self-published by its author in 1907, one hundred folios that Adams sent to the country’s best and brightest in the hope that it would spark sweeping social reform.

Mailer wasn’t a particularly close reader of Adams’s book, but a chapter had been assigned in his freshman English class at Harvard: “I remember thinking at the time what an odd thing to write about yourself in the third person. Who is this fellow, Henry Adams, talking about himself as Henry Adams?” Adams’s influence was latent; he remained in Mailer’s mind “as a possibility, the way a painter might look at a particular Picasso or Cezanne and say to himself, ‘That’s the way to do it.’” “On the one hand, it seemed interesting to speak of a protagonist named
Norman Mailer,” he said. “On the other, it was odd. It’s a very funny way to look at oneself.”