A Ticket to the Circus (44 page)

John used to sit on his father’s knee, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, while Norman directed a shot, and he learned every scene word for word. He would make us howl with laughter by doing all the dialogue with the perfect accents of the actors, like John Bedford Lloyd, who played Wardley Meeks, a Southern rich boy: “Wheah is mah money? Who HAS mah money?” We knew then that, at the very least, John was going to be an actor. I mostly just hung around the edges and watched, feeling far out of it. I was friendly with, but didn’t really know, the crew and cast, who had formed a family bond, as they always do. I was just the wife of the director, always in the way of the shot.

We spent Thanksgiving in Provincetown, with a big turkey dinner for everyone. Farrah Fawcett came to be with Ryan O’Neal, and Ryan’s sons Patrick and Griffin were there. Back in May that year, Griffin had tragically caused the death of Gian-Carlo Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola’s son, when he’d run a speedboat between two boats, not noticing they were attached by a wire, and the wire had hit Gian-Carlo. Griffin had been on drugs at the time. Griffin had also recently gotten into a fistfight with his father, who had knocked one of his front teeth out. (Ryan was a boxer on a nearly professional level, and he used to do it on the weekends with Norman’s little boxing club at the Gramercy Gym. He once broke the jaw of one of the inexperienced guys. Ryan was considered lethal.)

At Thanksgiving, Griffin was a bit of a mess, it seemed; he might have just come out of rehab, I’m not sure. Maggie was with us, and the two of them struck up an unlikely friendship that made us all nervous, but it was fortunately just an innocent flirtation. Maggie at fifteen was beautiful with dark curly hair and big blue eyes, but was unworldly, to say the least. Curious, Norman asked her what she and Griffin talked about, and she answered, “Our families. He’s so much like me. He understands me,” which made Norman and me stare at each other in bewilderment and dismay.

The movie was done shooting by December 14, and Norman came back to Brooklyn. It was hard for him to come down from the excitement of the movie, but I was glad to be with him again, and the kids were thrilled to have him home. I was hopeful that now that he had finished
shooting the movie, we would go back to being as we were before, but there was something wrong, I could feel it. It was a lot of small things a woman can sense, like when a famous photographer came to take his picture and she asked to take one of the two of us, he refused to have his picture taken with me and got annoyed when I protested. He was still going away quite a bit, too, doing postproduction things for the movie, and again I felt like a social widow, going to dinners alone, or with Michael, or staying home. People were beginning to wonder why I was always by myself, was anything wrong, and I would reply to their questions that things were fine, Norman was away working. But in my heart I knew better.

We had a big Christmas, as we always did, then I went to Arkansas to be with my father, who was having open-heart surgery. After his heart attack several years earlier and a few smaller procedures, he had kept on working, teaching heavy equipment operation to underprivileged kids through Job Corps in Cass, Arkansas. But now he’d had another heart attack, and the doctors told us if he didn’t have quadruple bypass surgery, he would die. He had no insurance, and he was too young for Medicare, so he went to the veterans’ hospital. His surgeon was only a senior resident, which made me a little nervous, but the doctor, I’ll call him Benicio, convinced us he made up for his lack of experience with youth, agility, and the latest knowledge, or so we hoped, and the operation was a success. My father got better every day; we brought him good food from home. Benicio had said he could eat anything he wanted until he got his strength back, and what he wanted was pinto beans and corn bread. At any rate, at midnight on New Year’s eve, I was in the hospital with my father. My mother and I were spending our nights in the waiting room sleeping on lounge chairs. She was asleep, so I tiptoed out and called Norman at midnight to wish him a happy New Year. He was having a small party at the apartment in Brooklyn. Laughter and merrymaking racketed in the background. We said “Happy New Year” and “I love you,” but he felt far away.

Benicio was on the floor checking patients. We had become friends during the week, since he stopped in to see my father frequently, and we sometimes had lunch together. It had been one of those odd occurrences when we’d met, as if we had known each other in a past life. As I hung up the phone from my call with Norman, Benicio could see I
was upset, and we went down to the cafeteria for coffee. I began to pour my heart out to him about Norman, how he kept pushing me away and how he didn’t really even live in New York anymore. He was staying in Provincetown most of the year. I was afraid he was having an affair, and it felt like my life was coming apart. Of course Benicio was sympathetic. And extremely handsome. Before I quite knew what was happening, I had gone with him back to his place. No mea culpa; it was great. It was so wonderful to have someone who really wanted me, even if it was only for a little while. And if Norman was having an affair, I could tell him I was, too.

My father got better, and after we got him settled at home, I went back to New York. Just as I came back, Norman left again, this time for San Francisco for a month to do postproduction sound for the movie. After a couple of weeks, John and I went out to visit him. We had a great time traveling around San Francisco, just John and me, while Norman worked. We went to Fisherman’s Wharf and did all the tourist things like the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum with its shrunken heads, and we rode the carousel and got our pictures taken in old-fashioned clothing.

Norman and I gave a cocktail party for the movie crew at his rented apartment, which had sweeping views of the bay and Alcatraz, and Norman let John be the bartender, standing on a box behind the kitchen counter. The first drink order he got was for a screwdriver. John knew it was made with orange juice but wasn’t sure what the other part was. He didn’t want to seem ignorant and ask, heaven forbid, so he just nonchalantly made it with beer. The man sputtered and spit it out onto the floor, and Norman gave John a quick lesson in bartending. How many kids can say their father taught them to bartend at nine? “Really,” as Kate once said, “when Norman Mailer is your father, how are you going to rebel?”

But there were clues in San Francisco that things were still wrong. One day I came back to the apartment unexpectedly to find an old girlfriend of Norman’s leaving. He swore nothing had happened, and I even believed him, but I found a hair clip in the bathroom, just the kind of thing a woman does who wants the wife to know she has been in her territory. I asked him point-blank if he was having an affair, if not with this woman, then with anybody. He swore he wasn’t. I broke down and
told him about my little fling with the doctor, thinking it would encourage him to come clean, and while he was hurt, he still adamantly insisted he wasn’t having an affair. At least the air was cleared for me. I was never good at lying or hiding things. Of course I told Norman it was over and I would never see Benicio again, that I had just felt so abandoned, so alone. Norman held me and told me he loved me and wanted our marriage to work. I wasn’t totally convinced.

The movie was done, and we took it to Cannes in the spring of 1987, where it was screened outside of competition. Norman was also a judge that year, so it was an exciting week for us. At last I felt like I was part of the movie, and met a lot of stars. He seemed proud to be with me, we had a good time, and I thought things might be getting back to normal. Benicio called me from time to time, and while we were fond of each other, we knew there was no way we would ever be together. He had a girlfriend, and I really wanted to make my marriage work.

The movie opened in September in the States, to wildly mixed reviews. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. It was nominated for four awards at the Independent Spirit Awards and seven at the Golden Raspberry Awards (the Razzies). Norman won a Razzie for worst director, tying with Elaine May for
Ishtar.
Tough Guys
was beautifully shot, thanks to John Bailey, who got one of the nominations for best cinematography, but nobody could figure out what the movie was trying to do, or even what it was. Was it a comedy or a thriller? People laughed when they should have been scared. They were befuddled when they should have been laughing. There were comments that ranged from
The Washington Post’s
“hard to classify; at times you laugh raucously at what’s up on the screen, at others you stare dumbly, in stunned amazement” to the
Chicago Reader’s
somewhat kinder “He translates his macho preoccupations (existential tests of bravado, good orgasms, murderous women, metaphysical cops) into an odd, campy, raunchy, comedy-thriller that remains consistently watchable and unpredictable—as goofy in a way as
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
”

It closed soon after it opened. Nobody took it seriously, and lines like “Oh man, oh God, oh man, oh God, oh man, oh God, oh shit and shinola,” which Ryan O’Neal had to say when he found out his wife was having an affair with the police chief, were repeated with delighted
incredulity. Ryan just wanted to pretend he hadn’t done the movie. In truth, everyone had tried to get Norman to take the “Oh man, oh God” line out, including me, which I regretted because it seemed that whatever I suggested strengthened his determination to do the exact opposite, so I felt responsible in a way for the line staying in.

There were also inadvertently funny lines, such as, “I just deep-sixed two heads,” said by Lawrence Tierney, a grand old B-movie gangster who played Dougy Madden, Ryan O’Neal’s character’s father, after he took the severed heads out to sea. There was a weird scene where Wings Hauser, who played the chief of police and the bad guy, has a stroke, and then recites long minutes of strange dialogue through a twisted mouth to his wife, Madeleine, played by Isabella Rossellini: “Patty Lareine was big time. Ooh, la, la! I thought you were big time, but you were nothing but small potatoes.” Of course, Isabella then shoots and kills him, as anybody would, and Dougy, who was listening outside the door, says to Ryan’s character, Tim, “I could’ve told him. You never call an Italian small potatoes.” It was painful to watch.

Still, it hurt me when the reviewers were nasty to Norman, in spite of the fact that I secretly agreed with a lot of what they said. Norman was such a little boy at times. He never gave up his wonder at life, his belief in the essential goodness of the world, nor his expectation that this time they would really like what he had done.
The Naked and the Dead
, after all, was his first foray into public love, and it made him an eternal optimist.

We were invited to take the movie to the Cuban Film Festival in 1989. At that time, there were no scheduled flights to Cuba. Americans weren’t supposed to go, and if they somehow did go, they weren’t supposed to spend any money. We traveled with Tom Luddy, the producer of
Tough Guys
, and Leonard Michaels, a fine writer who wrote a book called
The Men’s Club.
We were greeted at the airport in Havana by a gang of friendly writers and filmmakers who put mojitos into our hands. The Cuban government put us all up in a protocol house, once owned by a rich businessman. Nothing in the house had been changed since 1959, when the guy had left in the middle of the night for Miami. It was made of cool concrete blocks, with gray linoleum floors and louvered doors to catch a breeze. In the back garden, there was a small kidney-shaped swimming pool they made a point of telling us they had
filled just for us, and a nice metal-and-glass patio set, all straight out of the fifties. We had an ancient Mercedes and a driver who took us everywhere we wanted to go. We had our own chef, who cooked more food at one meal, I suspect, than the average Cuban had all week, but we ate everything, not to appear ungrateful or wasteful.

Tom had brought a shortwave radio along, and we sat out in the garden and listened to Radio Moscow. Tom said how ironic it was that Radio Moscow now provided real news while Cuba still did not. On the radio they were talking about the death of the physicist Sakharov and saying that Russia had lost one of its great patriots. This was thanks to Gorbachev, whom I admired greatly. Only a few years before, the USSR would have branded Sakharov a dissident or an imperialist agent.

Pablo Armando Fernandez, a well-known poet, became our best friend and guide, and we met several other writers, all of whom lived in shabby but genteel homes, surrounded by books and friends. They seemed to be able to criticize the government in conversation, but I doubt they would have been allowed to write and publish the things they were saying.

Norman, me, and Pablo Armando Fernandez.

Havana was beautiful; the vibrant colors of the buildings had long ago faded to soft rain-washed blues and corals and gold. The sun shone every day; the sea was a choppy indigo blue on the other side of the Malecon, a four-mile-long seawall on Havana Harbor; and the streets were full of people who seemed happy. Or at least people who knew the value of a laugh. Rows of schoolchildren in red-and-white uniforms ambled along, and they all smiled and wanted us to take their picture. There were also children in the tattered uniform of the street urchin—shorts and T-shirts with bare feet—to whom we gave packs of gum and candy and ballpoint pens, and they all wanted us to hire them to be our guides. I struck up a conversation with a man who spent his days selling cotton candy and beachcombing, who had a cotton candy cart covered with the detritus of the United States, naked rubber dolls with blond matted hair, plastic cartoon characters, baby pacifiers, soda bottles, and other exotic junk that had floated the ninety miles across the sea—his treasures.