Norman Mailer Crashes Out

New York in the late 1950s was a weird and wild place. Jazz clubs were packed. Robert Moses was carving expressways through people’s backyards, and the most famous novelist on the Upper West Side was looking for a bigger platform to stand on. That novelist, of course, was Norman Mailer— two time Pulitzer winner, Village Voice co-founder, and an absolute mess, dripping ego from every orifice. What follows is the prelude to a mayoral campaign that never happened, derailed by an infamous and truly grotesque domestic scandal.

Norman Malech Mailer (1923-2007)

The Author and The President

In July 1960 Esquire dispatched Norman Mailer to cover the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. The essay he penned, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” was a huge success. It presented the party’s high-born nominee, John F. Kennedy, as a long awaited savior, the man who might finally rescue the nation from suburbia-induced catatonia. Late in its development, the presidential hopeful granted Mailer a private interview at Hyannis Port. Star-struck, the novelist sweated through his suit while the future president chatted about politics in his classic laid-back style, and even complimented his book The Deer Park.

Mailer didn't know the real reason he had been invited to the famed compound was because the candidate’s team, aware of his comfortable association with conservative media people, wanted to subtly probe for any political dirt they suspected was circulating. Kennedy was actually quite reluctant to do the interview, Mailer was considered a bit of a wild card. But the faux-familiarity left the paunchy writer newly invigorated, convinced that literature could still affect change.

He was also inspired to mount a campaign for mayor of New York City. At least, that was part of the story. You see, Mailer was in the midst of a bitter, ongoing feud with another writer at the time, Gore Vidal— patrician wit, celebrated playwright, and grandson of Oklahoma’s first senator. That year, Vidal was barnstorming New York 29th congressional district with Eleanor Roosevelt’s blessing. One night during convention week he held court for the state delegation at Romanoff’s on Rodeo Drive. Mailer crashed the dinner, plopped himself down at the bar and after several highballs informed Vidal, “I hate you. You’re too successful.”

Back in Manhattan, October 1960, Mailer plotted what he called an “Existential Ticket”. He bragged that his coalition would fuse “the disenfranchised— criminals, Bowery bums, hipsters— with the city’s elite.” He drafted an open letter praising Cuba’s Fidel Castro, meant to start the campaign with “a rocket, not a press release.” and tasked his friend George Plimpton of the Paris Review with luring in society figures. Mailer would gather the rest.

November 19th, 1960

Mailer chose a Saturday-night house party at his apartment on 94th Street— nominally a 30th-birthday celebration for his boxer-friend Roger Donoghue— to “soft launch” his candidacy. There were over two hundred guests: half moderately sympathetic intelligentsia (including poet Allen Ginsberg), half skid-row drifters imported to dramatize his cross-class vision. Mailer was drinking heavily. Fights kept breaking out. The belligerent host divided the room into those “for” and “against” him. Adele Morales, Mailer’s increasingly frustrated wife and the mother of their two daughters, was among the latter group. Evidently Mailer’s maid remained by his side, but as Steve Newman of Medium put it in his own account, “what choice did she have?”

Norman Mailer and Adele Morales, 1960

At some point Mailer left the apartment. “He was down on the street punching people,” Morales said, “He didn’t know what his name was, he was so out of it.” When he returned around 4:30 AM— with a torn shirt and a black eye— about twenty people remained. Morales called him a “coward”. In her own recollection she used much more colorful language. They argued. Around 5:00 AM Mailer produced a 2 1/2-inch penknife and plunged it into her chest— and then into her back. Their horrified friends scrambled to help, assisted by a neighbor, novelist Doc Humes. Mailer responded, “Don’t touch her. Let the bitch die,” and started scribbling in a notebook.

Morales was rushed to University Hospital in critical condition; surgeons said the blade had nicked the sac around her heart. Mailer contacted a retired detective who told him to leave town. He considered going to Cuba, but ultimately kept an appointment for a live television interview with Mike Wallace the next day, musing about knives as emblems of manhood. Later, when Adele admitted to the police what had happened, the author was finally arrested.

Mailer was deemed “homicidal and suicidal” by court psychiatrists and held at Bellevue for seventeen days. He pled guilty to third-degree assault and received a suspended sentence. Obviously, this was leniency unavailable to most regular people. The media, true to form, were far more interested in Norman Mailer’s fate than that of Adele Morales. Still, the stabbing incident eviscerated Norman Mailer’s hopes of becoming mayor of New York in 1961— but the fantasy did not die. Only eight years later, he’d try again— a quixotic reprise— launched with columnist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate.