Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HEARD a good deal about Mr. Norman Mailer, and so walked all the way down Brattle Street to meet him for dinner before his performance last Friday. Even to initiates. Mr. Mailer was not immediately recognizable. There was a man standing by the stair case in the home of the Advocate Trustee with an inordinate number of companions for a dinner guest--but that man, rather short and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, seemed already to have passed the touchy line separating the confidently middle-aged from those rapidly approaching the status of Senior Citizen. Fortunately, spectacles removed and fingers relaxed...
Beatle-booted, bell-bottomed, turtle-necked, and althogether more hip-looking, we thought, than the next students gathered around him, Mr. Mailer was as generous with his conversation as anyone could demand. He held away over the worshipful without pause, punctuating 5th Avenue prep-schoolese with occasional puffings of his torso and rockings on his heel. A man who writes like a good whore smiling form the hip should be a good talker. Mr. Mailer is, and was Friday--at least, we learned, for a while. He did not, in fact, dine at all, but kept his post...
...conversation had turned inevitably to one of Mr. Mailer's avocations, boxing and to the chances of middleweights against Olympic wrestlers in street fights, when an Advocate editor introduced to the Guest of Honor another guest--the chief of Harvard's police force, an occasional journalist himself...
THERE WAS to be no rebellion, but we did watch an inconclusive fistfight between one indomitable heckler and another member of Mr. Mailer's audience in Lowell Lecture Hall that night. Hackling was in order, but questions from floor not pertaining to Mr. Miler's films were, he warned not. For the engagement was officially for the showing of clips and for pleading the cases of three films...
Never one to give in against unfair odds (and we suspect that Mr. Mailer, armed with a microphone, gets even money against the collective voices of a jammed Lowell Lee) he worked his way to a begrudged dominance by catching the audience off-guard with asides in impressively fluent double-talk, invocations of Harvard's Classical past, of God's blessing on the Advocate and Drinking in Public. We thought, at the time, that Mr. Mailer has a lot to learn about making films, but that he stands unchallenged authority the of putting audiences where he wants them...