A Blast from the Past (from the November/December 1987 issue of Film Comment
MAILER'S MINUET:Tough Guys’ Two Left Feet
by Karen Jaehne
***Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Maidstone screen at the Walter Reade Theater on July 2 as part of Film Comment Selects. An onstage discussion with Mailer will take place between screenings. Click here to purchase tickets. The Executioner’s Song will screen on August 5. Buy tickets here.***
“Film is a phenomenon,” observed the Norman Mailer of Maidstone days, “whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long.” After the premiere of his Tough Guys Don’t Dance at Cannes, that old Mailer-mot was on everybody’s lips. The literary giant was declared a cinematic dwarf, but undaunted—would we expect anything else?—Mailer opened his arms and mouth to scribblers looking for good copy. By the end of endless interviews that took him far beyond his call of duty as a jury member (jury president Yves Montand refused to disrupt his busy screening schedule to grant interviews), the critics proved more forgiving than the medium. Despite Norman’s unfortunate prophecy finding its fulfillment in the turkey trot of Tough Guys, the literary gangster coped with the hubba-bubba of his celebrity at Cannes like just another auteur in a bad year. The Norman invasion made the logorrhea of ciné-babbler Jean-Luc Godard look like a native defending his terrain with voodoo.
Godard could not have foreseen the competition Mailer would create for Croisette cajolery when, at the l985 Cannes festival, he insisted on Norman Mailer as his writer, before signing a Cannon napkin deal to direct a contemporary King Lear. He signed. Producer Tom Luddy was summoned to the Cannon Court.
“On the very napkin,” says Luddy, “was written that ‘Mailer writes the screenplay for Godard’s King Lear,’ so while the word was going around Cannes, someone told Menahem that I knew Mailer and that I had worked with Godard and that he had a three-picture deal with Zoetrope. So they made a deal with me whereby my first job would be to get Norman Mailer to agree to write this film. So I met with Norman, who then met with Godard in fall of 1985.
“Norman became interested but, uh, ‘leery’ if you will, of writing a modern version for Godard. He pointed out that he would lose twice, once to Shakespeare and then to Godard, because Godard would make mincemeat out of anything he wrote. Not that he would say no, because at the same time, he began to tell me that he wanted to make Tough Guys. And not that he thought anyone was going to back him to make it, but I said, ‘Since I’m talking to Cannon about the Lear thing, why don’t I talk about this, too?’ So I gave Tough Guys to Yoram Globus in London. Jeremy Thomas was in the room at the rime and, when he saw the book, he said, ‘What a great book. Nicolas Roeg has been dying to do this as a movie,’ so I could see this bell going off in Globus’s head and, ultimately, I was able to package a kind of two-picture deal with Cannon for Norman.”
Luddy came on as the producer for Zoetrope and began collecting a cast and crew of tough guys, who would be inclined to “work on it more for love than for money,” as Luddy says, offering his definition of “tough guys.” Meanwhile, Mailer and Golan and Globus became great friends, “because they have enormous respect for Norman as a writer and have demonstrated it primarily by “taking no fee as producers of this picture,” per Luddy. “Norman likes them as no-bullshit decision-makers.”
King Lear was begun in fits and starts with Rod Steiger, stage director Peter Sellars, and Godard all acting out Mailer’s script in which Godard in pajamas drags around “Punk,” Peter Sellars, trying to get him to make a film about King Lear. Sting was originally going to play Hamlet as an interloper into the film within the film. Norman’s script was called Don Learo in which Lear was modernized into a modern Mafia family, giving Steiger a chance to stretch across centuries.
Playing author to Godard’s auteur on King Lear for Cannon was “like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the sea,” Mailer told Le Monde. “We were strange animals that ended up being put in the same place. We were certainly civil to each other for the most part, but we really didn’t know how to pass a bowl of soup back and forth.
“The trouble is that I write only prose and Godard thinks only in images. Godard is a poet—and my track as a poet is not so fabulous. We were just different beasts, different animals. We parted amicably.”
For Lear, Godard fended off Mailer’s anti-Shakespearean prose better than Mailer did in Tough Guys, an utterly prosaic reduction of Mailer’s obsessions with mayhem and marriage, corrupt law and illicit liaisons. Tough Guys was like the suburban sloth of John Updike masturbated by the soapy hands of Douglas Sirk. Tepid acting deprived the intended thriller of its frisson and the grinding gears of the plot drowned out the hum of the Mailer vision of America run amok. Destined to become a camp classic (move over, Mommie Dearest), Tough Guys could be described as the cheap struggle to get an expensive piece of Cape Cod real estate, complete with Ryan O’Neal heaving the hefty Isabella Rossellini over the threshold of their at-long-last-home. After some six corpses had been put behind them. Six bad guys, of course.
Failure? The buoyant Mailer, like the unsinkable stiffs in his movie, was more concerned with folks not “getting” the comedy. Suddenly, we had a comedy, if not a comic, on our hands. Norman was ready to shift categories. Like Mussolini from the balcony of one of the wedding-cake hotels lining the Croisette, he found surer footing on the gutsy grounds of his proclamation of “a kind of self-parody, perhaps.” Y’all listenin’ down there? Norman’s only joking.
Or maybe Tough Guys bears witness to his infinite flexibility. His directorial ambitions during the shoot in Provincetown included the elimination of narration from cinema, although he later bowed to necessity as it became clear that the disjointed reveries, dreams, and apparitions of the film would not cut together. After three minor attempts (Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone), Mailer was still wrestling with the movie muse, who had sat so lightly on his shoulder during the shoot six months earlier, when he appeared to be marching theory and practice, past and present, genius and general all in lockstep toward his new career. Flashback of Norman in finer fettle!
How many scribblers dream of retiring from the Manhattan hustle to the lambent charms of Provincetown, laying down pen for lens, retiring from publishing to ordering the word made flesh? Other men’s fantasies became Mailer’s reality, as he headed up the invasion of his Cape Cod home surrounded by the mercenaries of the movies: producer Tom Luddy, “visual consultant” John Bailey, Cannon’s Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, Francis Coppola, and costume designer Michael Kaplan (Blade Runner, Flashdance) and editor Debra McDermott (F/X, Amadeus, even Howard the Duck). Mailer surrounded himself with pros. (“Cons” weren’t mentioned on the set, while Ryan O’Neal battled a $3 million suit in Manhattan civil court, and his son faced trial for manslaughter of Coppola’s son.) On location with Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Mailer—that old choreographer of machismo—struck the dignified pose of the anecdotal hero who inspired the title.
To understand the point of the film, of the book, and probably of the writer, the pivotal story explaining why hero Tim Madden’s father was the key to losing a big fight, goes like this:
Midway through the first-person narrative, Tim recounts: “My mistake was that I didn’t dance...
“My father’s face was without expression. ‘Do you remember Frank Costello?’ he asked.
‘Top of the mob,’ I said with admiration.
‘One night Frank Costello was sitting in a night club with his blonde, a nice broad, and at the table he’s got Rocky Marciano, Tony Canzoneri, and Two-Ton Tony Galente. It’s a guinea party,’ my father said. ‘The orchestra is playing. So Frank says to Galente, “Hey, Two-Ton, I want you to dance with Gloria.” That makes Galente nervous. Who wants to dance with the big man’s girl? What if she likes him? “Hey, Mr. Costello,” says Two-Ton Tony, “you know I’m no dancer.” “Put down your beer,” says Frank, “and get out there and move. You’ll be very good.”
‘So Two-Ton Tony gets up and trots Gloria around the floor at arm’s length, and when he comes back, Costello tells the same thing to Canzoneri, and he has to take Gloria out. Then it’s Rocky’s turn. Marciano believes he’s big enough in his own right to call Costello by his first name, so he says, “Mr. Frank, we heavyweights are not much on a ballroom floor.”
“‘Go do some footwork,” says Costello.
‘While Rocky is out there, Gloria takes the occasion to whisper in his ear, “Champ, do me a favor. See if you can get Uncle Frank to do a step with me.” Well, when the number is over, Rocky leads her back. He’s feeling better and the others got their nerve up too. They start to rib the big man, very careful, you understand, just a little tasteful chaffing. “Hey, Mr. Costello,” they say, “Mr. C., come on, why don’t you give your lady a dance?”
“‘Will you,” Gloria asks, “please!”
“‘It’s your turn, Mr. Frank,” they say.
‘Costello,’ my father told me, ‘shakes his head. “Tough guys,” he says, “don’t dance.’”
Adopting a tougher-than-thou pose, Mailer wrenched the first person narration of Tough Guys into some approximation of the cinematic objectivity required by a $5 million film. Still intrigued by the more experimental possibilities of the form, however, the Mailer of Maidstone imposed a fragile complexity of flashbacks and surreal fantasy on his tough tale of cops and writers, wife-swapping and head-hacking. Not to forget the obligatory curtsy to humility—writer’s self-doubt—Mailer ponders the likelihood of his own amnesia, after secreting the heads of two victims in his marijuana stash.
‘‘I’ll tell you I am tired of fighting. Every punk on the block thinks, ‘Boy, I’ll be the guy to beat him.’ Nobody has any idea of what and to whom I’ve lost. And I’ll be the last guy to tell.”
In person, Mailer is charmingly insecure. He doesn’t want to be asked about lenses or technical stuff for film magazines. In the narrow confines of his dressing room, bull and picador literally dance belly-to-belly, reversing positions for Mailer’s quick getaway, if he’s summoned back to the set. Mailer’s agility, despite his now-round form, recalls his past in the ring, where he supposedly sparred a couple of times with Ryan O’Neal, the man he has chosen to play the Writer Protagonist of Provincetown.
What is the movie about?
“I haven’t even thought about that,” he says, because the critics didn’t like what the novel “was about.” “When people start asking what something’s about, the critics come along and start saving, ‘It’s a tough guy murder mystery with elements of horror,’ or ‘It’s a surrealistic novel that derives,’” he now expands with a waving arm, “‘from the roman noir of the French,’ so forth and so on...
“That’s all very nice, but you try to write something that defies —no, not defies—that straddles categories. Categories are just critics’ attempts to bring order to a complex aesthetic universe. I’ve always resisted that because I feel it’s up to the working artist or craftsman to create their own order. If they pay too much attention to categories, that can really get in the way. You see that happening to young moviemakers all the time. They confuse their own opportunity to create order with an order created generations before and sacrifice creation for homage.
“I’ve written a lot of books that really fall out of category. Armies of the Night was called history as novel and the novel as history. A lot of people would have said, ‘No, the first part’s the novel, the second part’s the history.’ The Executioners Song I called a novel. The second book I did about Marilyn Monroe came out as an imaginary memoir. These are all forms to be explored, not obeyed.
“Tough Guys Don’t Dance is going to be a movie that drives critics insane because it doesn’t straddle two forms. It straddles about four or five.” Which makes it something of an impaired octopus.
Mailer sinks back into the pillow that offers the one note of comfort in this cell. His sudden relaxation seems to expand the walls beyond their four-foot berth. He’s the kind of big man who makes things around him seem just as big, not small in comparison.
“I think finally the whole Grand Guignol vein of Tough Guys was a kind of comedy of manners. Or tragicomedy without manners.” He grins, aware that he’s just delivered a Mailer-mot. Can we take it? In print? Famed for his expositions on the nature of writing, Mailer is eager to discuss the difference between novel and script, especially for a readership he presumes to care.
“I took it for granted that the film was going to be different from the novel. A screenplay is really the antithesis of a novel,” he explains as a strange Southern drawl seeps out from his increasingly casual slouch. “The merits of the novel depend upon a long. continuing inner voice of the narrative, and there should be no offscreen narration in a movie. 1 made the decision in the beginning of this film that I was not going to have an offscreen narration, notwithstanding all the virtues of Sunset Boulevard. I hate offscreen narration, don’t you?” He would later reach out for the lifeline of narration, but for now he was the Kracauer of Cannon.
“Narration is inimical to film. A profound trap. I knew once I started it, I couldn’t get out of it. So many marvelous sentences in the book had to be sacrificed, but I didn’t want this narrator saying things that look marvelous on paper but would bog actors down acting them out and dictate to audiences what to make of the images. Getting rid of the inner voice immediately alters the values of the work, which is why it took me six months to recreate a novel that only took two months to write.
“The novel was about a man’s immersion in his own vices, miseries, obsessions, and sometimes feeble attempts to get out of them. There happened to be a murder mystery circulating around that. But the center of the book was Madden and his relation to his wives, his father. It was essentially a novel about a man who only lived through his obsessions.
“The movie, on the other hand, is more about a man in a bewildering set of situations. He doesn’t know which woman he’s in love with. He finds all sorts of grizzly, gruesome things happening in the murky timelessness of Provincetown. He has some sense that this huge cocaine deal is going on, which did not happen in the novel, that is engulfing him. Finally, what I’m depending on is that the average person in the audience will feel that no matter how dramatic or devoid of drama their own life is, they will recognize the way things are always impinging on them. Odd events are coming in from nowhere. People they thought they could trust they now discover they cannot trust, unless perhaps in another way that turns out to he more useful hut doesn’t belie the sense of betrayal.
“That’s why I call it a comedy of manners. It’s about the style of people’s relationships, not about the guts of relationships. But other people are going to call it a horror movie. And those are the ones who will be speaking calmly. Some will slam it as absurd, because it doesn’t add up to anything at all. It’s not this or that. I don’t want it to. I want to make a film that’s out-of-category.”
The film is so far out that Mailer may soon find himself in as precarious a position as a film director as he now finds himself as a writer, emitting sounds like, “Anything’s easier than writing.” Or again, the scribe soigné: “Writing is not manic. It’s methodical, like learning impeccable tailoring and the measure of taste. My script, as opposed to the novel, was like a suit retailored to fit a different kind of body intending to do different kinds of things in it.”
“I’ll tell you something very interesting about scriptwriting,” says Mailer, unwilling to stop worrying the bone, and laughing at his insistence on people understanding the art of the screenplay. (He insists there are no reliable books about it.) “The screenplay you want to read is never really the final screenplay. The second or third draft is the one everybody will decide to go ahead with, but you owe yourself one more after that. And then, once the film is cast, you rewrite to fit the exigencies of the budget and the needs of actors who all have to fit together visually to lend some obvious sex appeal to the action. You do it for the actors because you chose them, or inherited them, or whatever, but they’re your actors and you owe them something tailor-made and not ready-to-wear.
“The final screenplay is just a record of how that suit was altered to fit the body and usually seems less fitting than the ones people like to read for production and financing. But it ought to accommodate the specialness of the cast and give each of them room to stretch, as we say in the theater. I guess you say that in the movies, but you don’t hear it much. Odd, huh?
“I gotta tell you, if somebody else had adapted my novel I would have been irked at the liberties they took. With my own novel, I felt I had a right to do things that drive me crazy in other people.”
How does Mailer feel about adaptations from his previous work? “It’s not worth discussing,” he snorts, the bones broken by others’ adaptations still on the mend. “The Naked and the Dead was a catastrophe. American Dream was so bad that friends advised me not to see it. They said, ‘You’ll be violent if you see it.’”
So, was this the source of his vaunted violence? The root of his tough guy reputation? “I didn’t see it,” he blurts out deadly serious. “I have friends I trust.” The effect is staccato.
“The novel took place in New York”—ah, another bone—“and they filmed in Los Angeles. It was a novel about New York, its nature, its essential impact on human life.” Marriage, it will be recalled, is something Mailer is quite practiced in.
The mention of marriage puts him on guard and he leaps to the defense of his current wife, Norris Church. “You should read some of her work. She has some very interesting screenplays. As a woman, you’ll bring a lot of appreciation to it,” advised the writer famous for telling women, “You look like one of my ex-wives.” A more avuncular figure than expected, Mailer has a disarming ability to treat women as honorable aliens.
“I like women,” he says, waving his hand generically. “But they’re different, and what makes them operate intrigues me, but I often lose patience with the process. And you’ve got to admit that women have changed individually, socially, in every way imaginable, and all so fast that it’s been like examining the permutations of the chameleon. Something basically feminine stays—not just the female form, but the female psyche. Talking about women is dangerous, especially to a woman.” Mailer concludes his statement with a flirtatious gleam in the eye that illuminates a good deal of the reputation he built in the Sixties and Seventies.
But now Mailer is preparing for the role of the serious director, and part of that persona requires that one not bash other directors, so he reins in his previous ire over adaptations of Mailer novels. “Elliott Kastner now owns Deer Park, and Joan Didion and John Dunne have done a screenplay. Sidney Lumet is supposed to direct. Everything is there, I think, but the money. I don’t know when it will be made, if ever.” Think it’ll be a movie? “I won’t get into that. Really. Not a good idea.”
Hollywood, or course, didn’t want to touch Tough Guys. “After options but no real action, I looked at it and realized how difficult it would be to adapt. The more I looked at it, the more problems I could see in it. But I knew that I was the only one who could do it. So I set to it, and then I thought, ‘Hell, I don’t want to write just another screenplay. I’ve written quite a few. I want to direct this one.’
“Various possibilities presented themselves. Three and a half million dollars appeared at one point, but the money was questionable. I decided I didn’t want to be part of a laundering operation. Then, lo and behold”—surely, not the first time this has been uttered by astounded auteurs—”Cannon came along. And Tom Luddy, who really gets things done. He’s an ideal producer—protective, creative, and likeable.
‘‘When it’s all done, I’m not going to say ‘This is my film.’ What I like about film is its collective effort. No single person can take the credit or the blame, especially in this type of situation. There are some 50 very talented craftsmen out there who are doing it with me.” Yet only Luddy stood by Mailer at Cannes.
“Finally, a director has to be an executive first. The creative part is only about 20 percent of a film. The many practical decisions prohibit the kind of consciousness that I, at least, associate with true creativity. A director has to be good at decisions. You have to make mistakes of judgment and not brood on them.” Especially not on the French Riviera, where brooding is like a bikini—unnecessary.
“I think if I were starting out as a young man, I might do it differently, but coming at it at my age, I think I’ll always be seen, if I keep at it, as a benign director.” He stretches the word out, “bee-nine,” and the idea jolts, as alarming as the vision of a beached whale.
“The managerial aspect of directing this operation is much like the military,” Mailer throws out, aware that many men have used the comparison. “Think of it as NATO exercises,” he advises, “because not much destruction can come of it.”
Mailer’s previous films were off-the-cuff, experimental efforts of a renaissance renegade.
“Those three movies I directed then, cautions Mailer, “were not just finger exercises. They were like mad raids. The last one, Maidstone, was done in seven days and shot in 45 hours. We had five camera crews. It threatened to become a kind of Ben-Hur of the underground. Look at the crowd scenes, the party stuff. It’s huge, a wild-ass movie. I spent three years cutting it, because it was so undisciplined and shot in such a bizarre fashion.”
Mailer claims he arrived at his original conception of a director as “a hostess,” because “that’s what a director seemed to have to do to make it cheap. It’s like you’re giving a party and you invite people to the party, in effect, then you savage the ingredients. I figured I had to act in my own films, too, in order to control it. I’ve used this image before, but not that often, so here goes.
“Let’s say a hostess decides to give a party in black-and-white. She says, ‘Everybody come in black or white.’ And they do. Along about midnight, in walks a woman in red. She’s good enough that the hostess doesn’t say, ‘Throw her out of my party,’ but still, the theme of the party has been altered, and if the hostess is smart, she’ll keep walking around trying to contain the woman in red to keep her from totally distorting the party.
“In those films, I had a sort of ongoing plot. And I’d try to get people back to it, but there were people there who had come to hurt the movie. And some to help. What we did get was an enormous release of energy. Because people didn’t have lines they had to remember, they were able to act. Anybody can act when they don’t have to remember the lines. They’re just talking, and there’s this constant feeling of discovering actors just because they’re not pretending and reciting.”
Mailer is directing a “discovery” in Tough Guys, Debra Sandlund, about whom he says, “She listens carefully.” Known on set as “Obedient Debra,” the tough, pert little blonde was recommended to Mailer by producer Fred Roos. “I loved her. We all loved her,” raves Mailer, whose penchant for blondes began with Marilyn and is summed up in Tough Guys with the line “Any woman who is a blonde is a blonde.” It’s a choice not a chemical. The other blonde in Tough Guys is Frances Fisher, who is a shade feistier than Sandlund, although the two blondes would appear to come from the same bottle.
“I think Norman hates women,” Frances blurts out, eager to share her discovery. “Not because of anything personal. He’s gawd-awful nice to me, but look at what I’m doing in this movie: I go down on two guys, get fucked on a Jeep, and get my head chopped off. Norman Mailer hates women. People ought to know,” she says. Noted.
Mailer is not particularly loved by his actors in Provincetown, which doesn’t seem to bother him but keeps Ryan O’Neal busy mediating between the disgruntled performers and the reportedly demanding director. He is prone to holler “Stop that” mid-speech rather than shape and hone between takes, and yet everybody is clearly eager to work on Tough Guys, as if it represents the Big Break. Everybody, that is, but Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini.
Rossellini’s presence is very mysterious, sheltered from inquiring minds who want to know, while playing the woman brunette the writer has truly loved and exploited in his past before he fell into the clutches of the blondes. According to Luddy, Isabella read the script in Israel, where she was doing another Cannon film and was initially intrigued because she was, apparently, confused about the “crazy richness of the dialogue. She didn’t know what the words meant but she loved how they sounded. I had a very funny time explaining words she’d never heard of.”
“What is a dolt?” Isabella asked Luddy. She had a chance to ask Norman himself, and he, too, was stymied. Rossellini had lost a fur coat by going to a party at Mailer’s house one time, so they had met before, bur who knew where or when—as the time came round for actress and director to discuss character.
Mailer admits that his explanation to Rossellini of why Tough Guys is a comedy of manners was roughly “Manners? If you got ’em, you survive. If you don’t, you don’t.” Rossellini’s manners were most evident in her assiduously polite refusal to talk to anyone but Mailer and the film’s publicist during the shoot. Rosselini’s isolation may have to do with the general grumbling about Mailer, with whom she clearly has no quarrel.
“Norman has become something of a lightning rod for a lot of loose energy,” claims Wings Hauser, who plays the local marijuana-smoking lawman. “Actors are confused by his methods. He knows what he wants but doesn’t know how to get it.”
“Most actors are very . . . uhm, practical,” explains Mailer tiptoeing through his word’s, “about the moment. I don’t ever talk to them about what a movie is about. To give them a large theme is going to get in the way of most actors. Not because they’re not intelligent enough to understand a large theme, but the last thing you want them to do is play a theme at a given moment. The theme is just the average of all the things that went into it, all the manias and all the depressions. But you don’t want to see ‘manic-depressive’ on screen. I’m responsible for the movie, not the actors.
“Nothing gets actors more upset than for a director to rein in their brilliance, even if it detours the movie. But you have to say ‘Rein in your instinct.’ I have to be a policeman, along with everyone else.”
Earlier in the evening, Mailer did exactly that from the backseat of a police cruiser, directing the murder of one of the blondes. Watching the half-hour of rehearsal through the rolled-up windows of the car is like the fish fathoming the scene outside the fishbowl. Apparently nothing’s going on, but the bipeds are vigorously napping their fins.
The silence offers a chance to take a long look at P-town, revealing itself by the hour, much like the striptease of the production—the all-consuming locale of the novel, the haunted cul-de-sac of Mailer’s middle-brow desperados, folks as willing to create ghosts by dispatching their neighbors as to live with them. Provincetown is making its mark in the film version, having triumphed over mangy impostors found in North Carolina, where the unions are softer than the Massachusetts boys who shut down Tough Guys for four days until Cannon could strike a deal over Thanksgiving.
You can almost hear the teamsters taking tea over the non-union shoot: “They fuckin’ want to see tough guys...?” A flash of teeth, a slash of tire.
But in mid-November, half way through the shoot, the roads around the Cape were lonely, the sand giving way only to wind and water. A tight little movie crew buzzed from location to location with a studious concentration and mysterious timetable that impressed New Englanders accustomed to scoffing at meandering tourists. In scarves and mufflers, the locals huddled to monitor the cult rituals that produce the epiphanies of the silver screen. They nodded sagely. They approved of the sullen silence of Tough Guys.
In the late afternoon on the edge of Wellfleet, the white clapboard homes appeared unimpressed by movie stars or the magnificent sunset dipped in bronze. The azure sky seemed equally indifferent to the threat of sundown. It glistened like something out of South Pacific. The elegiac benevolence of English landscape painters relegated the problem to some county museum. The film crew, scudding up and down the road from their massive trailer trucks full of fakery to the spot with the splendid backdrop of the Cape in autumn, jerked it all back into the clutter of the present-as-we-know-it. What a place to retire—even for an unretiring guy like Norman Mailer.
And here he came again bundled up and bouncing like the Michelin man, his white hair covered by a thick fisherman’s cap. He appeared to be in charge, moving among the technicians, checking on details casually rather than obsessively, making it look easy but busy, while they got beyond the “magic hour” of sunset notoriously difficult to film.
“What I like about movie direction,” says Mailer, “is that it’s so different from novel writing. One’s living free in the world in a funny way. It’s like being in combat. Things happen every day as you inch forward from place to place. It’s marvelous because it’s combat without blood. We’ll have a rout now, then we’ll stop and eat, clean up the crumbs, and take the next hill.
“Novel writing is so visionary in contrast, so obsessive. You love the novel, you hate it. The novel nags at you, accuses you, reminds you what you haven’t done for its life. Terribly personal, like a mate, I repeat, a wife. It’s total and sometimes has nothing to do with anything else in reality but it has to claim you. It’s confining in the same way marriage is confining. All the sides of yourself that don’t fit the other person can’t be used. I know. I’ve been doing it for 40 years.”
Mailer thinks of his production team in similarly domestic terms, “like a hell of a good family. I’m used to being around families. I’ve nine children, you know, so I’m used to a great many people figuring out how to get it all together. My oldest, she’s in Chile and 37. She’s a psychiatrist, then there’s one who’s 28, and they go all the way down to eight. You may have heard of Kate Mailer. She’s quite a good actress, did Marilyn Monroe for me at the Actors Studio last year in Strawhead.”
Mailer’s pride in this daughter glows through his leathery exterior. “If I have any talent as a director,” he chuckles, “it’s the small gift of discovering very talented 23- and 24 year-old girls. First Kate, now Debra.
“Then there’s Steve, who’s a good actor, and I have another son who’d like to become a movie producer. And my stepson’s hero is Tom Savini, because he wants to get into special effects. John-Buffalo says, ‘I’m going to be a film director,’ so we may have the makings of a studio. Michael is the one to run the studio—a real prick. No, hahahaha.”
Family life, such as this is, definitely appeals to the new Norman Mailer, who has rediscovered what he calls “my practical side, which has been totally ignored. It atrophies when you’re writing, because you wait so long for practical decisions if you’re involved in your writing. And that’s a big if. So people go around calling you impractical and a mad genius but totally incompetent. I do have a practical nature, and this is my opportunity.” Norman, the closet pragmatist; does anyone buy it?
“It’s much too late to be a great movie director,” admits Mailer, “I could never be as good as I am at writing. But I think I’ll be an average-to-good director, and what they’ll say about me is ‘Oh, he brings the movie in on time, on budget. He’s so practical, he’s so reasonable.’ And the funny thing is I’ll finally get a reputation as a guy you can trust with the money!” He gets a good laugh at this funniest of all things.
Maybe the basic requirements of a Hollywood director do fit the man who Vanity Fair saluted as having “never missed a party, never lost a fight.” “Possibly,” answers Mailer skeptically, “but that rep is untrue on both counts.” Who beat him? “I can’t begin to name all the people I’ve lost fights to, but I’ll tell you I am tired of fighting. Every punk on the block thinks, ‘Boy, I’ll be the guy to beat him.’ Nobody has any idea of what and to whom I’ve lost. And I’ll be the last guy to tell.”
The work betrays what Mailer won’t. And the guys he’s lost to appear to be gals, at least on location in his Provincetown home, which has been thoroughly gutted and redecorated to match the Southern-belle-turned-Yankee-tart of the heroine, Patty Lareine. The voluminous vulgarity of her nouveau noxious character bubbles forth in a maddening mixture of apricot, pink, peach—a medley of intrauterine colors, topped off as one ascends the stairs by a gigantic conch shell of vagina dentata. Feathers, fluff, and a white baby grand on a lime-green oriental carpet downstairs, while in the upstairs bedroom, white chintz flounces and 19th-century porcelain bath fixtures figure in a feminist scheme to asphyxiate reason. It’s all the work of Armin Ganz, who is loathe to discuss the reputed presence of a ghost on the third floor, where Mailer’s venerable presence is intact in tasteful paintings, heavy oak furniture, globes and swords and guns and brown. “Norman is about as clear in his visual imagery as a director can possibly be,” attests Ganz, admitting the war between sexes was recapitulated in the decor.
According to Luddy, the sexual skirmishes of the film are only the surface of a tale he describes as “trial by macho. It’s a brilliant study in machismo with the irony and flavor of exaggerated characters, couched in a mystery-horror film. One guy, Regency, is a pathological errant cowboy who relates to Ronald Regan in, uh, Norman’s mind. Then there’s the rather wounded outcast whose machismo drives him crazy; he gets violent and goes mad.
“Then there’s the bisexual, Wardley, who can’t live up to the crazy macho standard. And Ryan O’Neal, who is vulnerable and a victim of the macho myth, survives, the only one, the writer.” This is a succinct version of Mailer’s complex masculine code, at the center of which is the male victim.
There are mistakes too monstrous to admit,” says a witch in Tough Guys. Mailer sometimes worries that his big mistake has been to become too identified with machismo. “It is not my primary concern. A tough guy is not necessarily machismo-obsessed. Macho is a quality, not an essence. American men are dedicated to finding out how strong they arc, I think, because the country itself is the most powerful in the world. Their identity behooves them to measure themselves in terms of power. And ever since Hemingway, there seems to be only that measure of a man.
“I’ve got to tell you that I find the perception of me as a macho disturbing, because it’s accompanied by a ha-ha-ha attitude. People who disdain power, or laugh at it, are ignoring what is absolutely central to being an American. And it’s not just a physical notion of what macho means.
“Am I the only defender of a spiritual, political, dynamic machismo in American life? We can’t backpedal into guilt and spiritual consciousness. It’s right there before us and facing it head-on is also what macho is about. Not to be afraid of your own power is what life is about,” concludes Mailer in a talk after completing principal photography on his dark, tough, kinky picture about a man not sure if he’s guilty, or for what. Tough Guys is intellectual machismo, at best.
Mailer is the kind of guy who, if he had to dance, would want bullets at his feet. And he got ’em at Cannes. More Mailer than movie, Tough Guys turned the turkey trot of the screen into a tango on the Croisette.
