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The Guest From HellSavoring Norman Mailer's legendary appearance on The Dick Cavett Show.

By Troy Patterson
Posted Thursday, Aug. 2, 2007, at 1:42 PM ET
Norman Mailer. Click image to expand.

What's your take on Cassavetes? Here's mine: The filmmaker is one of three avant-gardists who readied America for reality television and the cult of pop personality, and his highly wrought psychodramas are an essential template for every loosely scripted, boozily delivered Real World screaming match. You will surely agree that one of his co-forefathers is Andy Warhol, whose Screen Tests made one giant leap for voyeurism and whose Sleep perfected the art of nothing happening. Do you need convincing that the other is Norman Mailer? If so, catch the tail end of The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer, a film and video retrospective running in New York through Aug. 9. Among its raw pleasures, the series documents how Mailer's quest to become the King of All Novelists—the man with the biggest books, the tallest platform, and the manliest existential pain—led him to play jack, joker, and knave in many a medium.

You probably missed Maidstone, the third and last of the underground films Mailer directed. A.O. Scott went justifiably out of his head, two weeks ago, for its final scene, writing that it "captures something essential in Mr. Mailer—his reckless bravado, his willingness to court ridiculousness and the loss of control. Very few artists today, in any medium, exhibit this kind of crazy passion." Long story short: In this scene, actor Rip Torn makes a choice—an artistic choice and a bold one—to hit Mailer in the skull with a hammer. The play of feeling on Mailer's face after this happens is beyond compare. First, there is anger—appropriately, as he is trying to bite off Torn's ear. Then, still angry, he hears out Torn's explanation of his motives, while also trying to look tough and not too angry. Then, while also trying to quiet his wife and kids, he's trying to wipe the smirk off his blood-streaked face. He's smirking because he knows exactly how fabulous this footage is.

Mailer's small-screen efforts are only slightly less exciting. According to biographer Mary Dearborn, Mailer launched his studies of television around the time he was writing Deer Park—"He had begun watching heavily in 1954, the same year in which he discovered pot, and he often watched into the small hours of the morning"—and his combination of wit, unpredictability, and readiness to rumble have made him a captivating talk-show guest.

The video Assorted Appearances 1968-2004, now playing at the Paley Center for Media in connection with the festival, amounts to a greatest-hits collection. Here we find Mailer all but flirting with William F. Buckley on Firing Line: "For years, I've felt that one of the problems with this country is that it's insane." With a flip of the calendar, he's chatting with chain-smoking Johnny Carson about Nixon in China and tribal warfare in New Guinea, and, by the '90s, graciously condescending to appear opposite Bill Maher. But Mailer's most legendary advertisement for himself aired live on Dec. 2, 1971, and the Paley Center billed it, last week, as "Sparring With Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show." Charlie Rose's producers included a famous part of the action near the half-hour mark of this clip, but to properly appreciate Mailer's crude righteousness and semi-cultivated berserk aura, you've got to size up the full text.

Should these 75 minutes of Cavett ever be adapted into one-act stage play, the part of the host should go to Jude Law, but only on the condition that he delicately synthesizes his I Heart Huckabees oiliness and his Talented Mr. Ripley hauteur, while also bringing in elements of Conan O'Brien's humble clubbability. Cavett, being a fancy lad, made his loud studio audience wait two beats before he made his entrance—electric seconds of empty spotlight—then, lump in his very tan throat, flubbed his lead-in: "I wish I shared your enthusiasm." He then did a self-conscious bit of literary parody that involved an A-minus impersonation of Buckley. He then used a synonym for "advertising spot" too precious to repeat.

After those messages, the camera came up on Cavett playing audience Q&A: "Are there any other questions? ... Do I dye my hair? No. I tint my body a little to set it off." Then Vidal (to be played by Frank Langella on-stage) came out. His eyebrows were a touch lugubrious, but his name-dropping was excellent. "I had dinner with Philip Roth the other night, and … " He drew out the word "Roth" in an exquisite manner—it's like he was saying the s in España, or rolling a th. Not to be left out of the impersonation game, Vidal then gave a first-rate Eleanor Roosevelt, the kind of powerful performance grounded in deep research. He told the one about the time he caught her arranging gladioluses in the toilet bowl.

Next came Janet Flanner. Cavett and Gore treated her like royalty, and she gave them no reason not to, combining aspects of Helen Thomas, Diana Vreeland, and the queen mother. I like Dame Maggie Smith for the part. Cavett cravenly admitted that he'd always thought she was a man because the byline on her "Paris Journal" column in The New Yorker was Genet. She explained that she's just a reporter: "There's no gender in that. No sex, either. None." Cavett, almost literally kneeling now, inelegantly set up her anecdote about finding Ernest Hemingway in the bathtub, and she did the radio edit, and her Papa imitation was exquisitely subtle.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.
Photograph of Norman Mailer by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

For all his obsequiousness, name-dropping, etc., he was smart, he had good guests, he let them talk, and he kept the conversation relatively intelligent. Who do you think is better - Charlie Rose? God help us, Larry King?

Anyway, yes, Mailer asked Cavett

"Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask your question?" You left out Cavett's answer:

"Why don't you fold it 5 ways and put it where the moon don't shine?"

Mailer, as I recall, was speechless (however briefly) for the first and only time that evening. I could be misremembering - it was a long time ago.

--Ex-Fed

(To reply, click here.)

Despite his oft-displayed capacity for behaving like any other precious horse's patoot from Yale, Cavett scored one of the best-ever shots on the deserving Mailer.

Mailer was sitting to Cavett's left during an interview on the latter's daytime program. Doing the high end of pomposity, Mailer expressed deep and abiding admiration for his own intelligence, insight, ability and willingness to share them with mortals.

Cavett did his you're boorish and I'm peeved glare, saying to Mailer something very close to: 'Perhaps you would like another chair to contain your enormous intellect!'

It brought the house down in Cavett's studio, and in my apartment.

--EdH

(To reply, click here.)

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