Mailer Norman - A ticket to the circus: a memoir

E very evening at six, after an afternoon of writing in our studios, Norman and I would meet in the bar next to the living room for a glass of wine. Wed look out at the sea and the boats in Provincetown Harbor, watch the gulls, and talk. After a lifetime of boozebourbon and gin and rum, scotch and vodkanow Norman liked red wine mixed with orange juice, a mild sangria punch, while I sipped a dry Kir on icesoda pop wines, a taste of sweet, a drop of alcohol, to help us unwind. Those were hard, slow days, the last days of summer 2007. Norman was still writing, but fighting to breathe, and I had my problems, too. Eternity was on our minds a lot of the time when we talked.

I wonder if people will remember me when Im gone, Norman would frequently muse. Will they continue to read my books, do you think? Or will they just forget me?

Most of the time, I replied, Of course youll be remembered, sweetie. Youre one of the most famous writers in the world! But he knew as well as I did that there were a lot of dead and forgotten writers who had once been famous.

When Im gone, hed continue, and you write about me, I want you to say

I would invariably interrupt him. Im not going to write about you. Ill never write about you. Nobody would believe it. It was almost a game we played; he never gave up telling me what to write about him, whether it was some message to the kids, or something about his work. I always brushed him off with, Why dont you tell them yourself? Why dont you write your own memoirs?

Its too late, hed answer.

I might go before you. You never know, Id say. We didnt want to face it, which one of us would go first, so we just kept on playing the game.

Andy Warhol had once urged me to put a tape recorder on a belt and wear it around all the time. Norris, he said, in that soft talcum powder voice, you live such a fascinating life. Every word that comes out of Normans mouth is a pearl. Its so easy. All you have to do is change the tape every hour, and youll have a complete record of your life. I laughed, but Andy was dead serious.

I dont believe that every word out of my husbands mouth was a pearlwhat wife does? Although now I wish I had recorded some of those pearls Norman dropped along the way.

I truly believed I would never write about Norman. And if I ever did write about him, it would not be as his secretary taking dictation. Even though wed lived together for thirty-three years, Norman wasnt my whole life; I had been married before, and had a child from that marriage. Id had a career. Family. I once had ambitions and dreams that had nothing to do with Norman Mailer. But we met, and nothing was ever the same again.

After he was gone, I found myself haunted by our life together. It spooled across my mind at night like the reels of a movie. Vivid. Garish. Heartbreaking. Frustrating. Sexy. Comical. Too often, it had been public. I used to say I had no skeletons in my closet; they were all in the pages of the New York Post. Night after night, the past played out, in that space between memory and sleep, until finally I realized that Norman was going to get his way; I was going to write about him. But, as I said to his spirit, it was my life as well as his. I would write it on my own terms.

Whatever you say, dear, I imagined him replying, a smile on his face, as he continued to send me notes in my dreams.

M y grandpa was a mule skinner. My husband, Norman Mailer, thought that was a noteworthy fact, and he loved to toss it out there in conversation at New York dinner parties, watching the stiff smiles of the socialites as they imagined someone like the Texas Chain Saw Massacre guy skinning out a mule and nailing its bloody hide to the barn door. Theyd glance at me a tad uneasily, Norman much amused, while Id explain that a mule skinner was a mule trainer and try to change the subject. The truth was, there might have been a little flick or two of a black snake whip involved to get their attention (mules being one of Gods most stubborn creatures), but they were valuable property, not to be abused, and while Im proud of my ancestry, I dont think that particular talent dribbled down to me in any ability to skiner, trainNorman. He loved to hear the stories of my familyhe said he felt like he had married the great American novel. I guess you could look at it like that, since I have a Cherokee great-great-grandma and I can trace both sides back to the early and mid-1700s, when the first big wave of immigrants started arriving from the British Isles, looking for a better lifeor maybe running from the sheriff. Nobody really knows now; its all lost to the years.

My mule skinner grandpa Jeames (standing), my great-grandpa Benjamin Franklin Davis, and my half-Cherokee great-grandma, Mary Davis.

I dont even know for sure which country they came from, the Davises and the Phillipses, but several family stories survive, some birth and death records, and a few old pictures. My great-great-great-grandpa Stephen Phillips fought in the Revolutionary War; maybe my great-great-great-grandpa Caleb Davis did, too. He was in America then, living in Maryland, but records are sketchy. Both my great-grandpas fought for the rebels in the War Between the States, as they called it then. Down the line, the assorted grandpas and uncles married women with names such as Sarah Allen, Dicey Benefield, America Dillard, Tennessee Chronister, and Lavinia Pigg and named various of their children after George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, and Andrew Jackson. Somebody in the mix was called Seaborne Featherstone. The majority of them are now only names on a register, dates on a page, the women giving up their fathers names to take their husbands, whole branches of family for the most part lost. They settled in Virginia or Maryland or the Carolinas, raised cotton and farmed; some had slaves. I hate that but choose to believe they were at least kind to them, because one of the slaves on record, Granny Flowersalong with her son Jasperdidnt leave the family after the Civil War but went with my great-grandpa George Washington Phillips and his wife, Sarah, to Dardanelle, Arkansas, in 1869, where they started a cotton gin. Granny helped raise their kids. It was noted that she liked to gather apples in her apron and eat them while sitting out under the apple tree.