Mailer Remembered @ Carnegie Hall: “Well, Why the F*** Not?”
A point of clarification concerning the NY Times writeup of Norman Mailer‘s memorial service:
“When Stephen Mailer was impersonating his father,” Patricia Cohen reports, “he jokingly remonstrated against The New York Post, which, he said, had printed that at the funeral, Stephen had sung the sentimental Elton John hit ‘Candle in the Wind.’ What a ridiculous metaphor for Norman Mailer’s life, he said. ‘If anything, I was a forest fire in a hurricane.’”
In fact, the first thrust of the younger Mailer’s attempt to give Dana Carvey a run for his money was to point out that he had actually sung “Your Song” at the funeral, not “Candle in the Wind,” and it wasn’t until he’d blasted the paper for getting the facts wrong that he went on to attack the metaphor. A minor point, perhaps, but it helps the story (and the combative but heartfelt father-son relationship running as subtext beneath the performance) make a little more sense.
I confess that unlike the intrepid representatives from the Times, USA Today, and the Associated Press, I was unable to stay for the entire memorial service, but the block of family anecdotes was clearly the emotional anchor of the event—from self-professed “wild card” Stephen’s out-sized performance to Kate Mailer’s tale of the father-daughter dynamic reframed as the Outward Bound trip from hell, to Maggie Mailer’s touching account of her father’s recognition of her creative aspirations. Still, there were moving tributes from the literary community: William Kennedy spoke of seeing Mailer in his final days, still planning a sequel to The Castle in the Forest, even though even he knew he was unlikely to live to finish it; Random House editor David Ebershoff observed that Mailer was taking books about Hitler into the hospital to use as research right until the end.
And publisher Gina Centrello had a story about that book that perfectly encapsulated Mailer’s personality—after she and Ebershoff received the finished manuscript, they agreed that one difficult section in the novel should be cut, and worried about how to ask him. Mailer anticipated their request as soon as they began to frame it, saying, “If I ditched that section, the book would be more of a page turner.” Yes, Centrello recalled replying enthusiastically, glad he could see it her way, it would be more of a page turner. “Gina,” he said, “I hate page turners.”
(photo by Nancy Crampton from the memorial program)
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