Mailer and Germaine Greer in 1971.
From the Guardian: “It was a quiet end to one of the loudest and most controversial voices in American letters.”
From Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s astonishing Town Bloody Hall, comes this immortal bit of Mailer: “If you wish me to act the clown, I will take out my modest little Jewish dick and put it on the table and we can all spit and laugh.”
It is quiet indeed today, with no spitting and no laughing.
Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84 (NY Times)
“Let’s Do It,” Joan Didion’s review of The Executioner’s Song, 1979
Norman Mailer, Rip Torn, and hammer (YouTube)
“Changes,” Rebecca Mead on Town Bloody Hall, May 3, 2004
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[...] Here’s a link to my write-up in the Los Angeles Times of the Norman Mailer memorial last week at Carnegie Hall. I got to run on a bit about D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s Town Bloody Hall, a documentary of a 1971 debate about Women’s Liberation, which features a slew of literary celebrities as well as Cynthia Ozick’s unprintable query to Mailer about his writing practice. [...]