Word: mailer
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...NORMAN MAILER 239 pages. Little, Brown...
Champion Muhammad Ali is steadily punching his way through assorted beefcakes to become the highest-paid athletic performer of all time. He received $2 million for his light workout with Joe Bugner and has been promised twice as much for his September bout with Joe Frazier. Heavyweight Norman Mailer's last big deal was a $1 million contract to produce 500,000 to 800,000 words, or roughly five books. After taxes and expenses, he notes, that is not much money for a man who bears the costs of five marriages and seven children...
Perhaps this is what makes The Fight, Mailer's account of last year's Ali-Foreman bout in Zaire, humid with a sense of obligation. Even though Ali beat the odds and regained his championship, it was not a truly good fight. For all his buildup as a killing machine, Foreman moped around the ring like a man bitten by a tsetse fly. Mailer's blow-by-blow description of the fight strains to create more excitement than a ringside radio announcer. "Making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blonde wig" is his punchy...
...next 20 years, Doctorow fought the blank page-and won four times. Between novels he was a reservations clerk for American Airlines, a reader for CBS, Ian Fleming's editor at New American Library, Norman Mailer's editor at Dial Press, and most recently a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College...
...Mailer points out, implicit in this magnetism between fan and star is an ever increasing potential for violence. It is simply a matter of tease on the star's part, she never intends to let the public devour her. But passions have been set into play and they cannot be neutralized by an act of will. The other side of adulation is murder...