Word: mailer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Soak the story in reality, bad luck, stupidity and evil for a while, and it might marinate into the parable of Jack Abbott and Norman Mailer: the redemption of the distinctly uninnocent. In one sense, the tale is merely a particularly sensational item of literary gossip. But buried amid the blood and chic is an interesting question of principle. Almost everything, as Thomas De Quincey noticed, has either a moral handle or an aesthetic handle. Which handle do you reach for in the Abbott-Mailer case...
Silence fell over the Manhattan courtroom where Abbott is on trial on a charge of murdering Adan, 22, a waiter and an aspiring playwright, last July-a bare six weeks after Abbott had been released from prison on the urging of Novelist Norman Mailer. Not a cough sounded as Abbott, 37, gave some grisly details of the aftermath of the 5 a.m. stabbing outside the Bini-Bon restaurant where Adan had worked. Adan, Abbott related, "said, 'You didn't have to kill me.' He started going backward. From his face he looked like he was dead...
...about to attack him with a knife. "It was a tragic misunderstanding," said Abbott, covering his eyes with a hand. From a front row of seats, Henry Howard, Adan's father-in-law, shouted: "You intended it, you scum! You scum, you useless piece of s---. You and Mailer and all the [other] creeps." The standing-room-only audience burst into applause, and court officials hustled Howard out of the courtroom. Fisher asked Judge Irving Lang to declare a mistrial. Lang promised a ruling Monday...
...trial has been as sensational as its background was bizarre. Abbott, who has spent 24 of his 37 years behind bars, was paroled from Utah State Prison last spring, after Mailer had arranged publication of Abbott's book, In the Belly of the Beast, a horrifying description of prison life, and offered him a job as a researcher. On the fatal July morning, Abbott was breakfasting at the Bini-Bon with two young women and asked Adan if he could use the restroom. Adan replied that it was for employees only, and the two began a quarrel that they...
...Yorkers-1,000 freebies and 5,000 paid-squelched through hock-deep gutter slush into the theater. There was a satisfactory array of the famous on hand, and the famous-for-being-famous, somewhat too swaddled against the cold to glitter: Arlene Francis, Paul Simon, Norman Mailer, Mrs. Frank Sinatra, Adolph Green, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Andy Warhol, Christopher Walken and Liza Minnelli. It is important at such events that especially celebrated ladies be whisked quickly through the crowd before the groundlings can become unruly in their worship, and Nastassia Kinski, one of the film's stars, wanly beautiful...