Norman Mailer Remembered In Massive Carnegie Hall Memorial
NEW YORK — You need a big block of time, and space, to say goodbye to Norman Mailer.
More than 2,000 mourners filled Carnegie Hall to near capacity Wednesday for a two-hour-plus memorial, concert, literary tribute, family therapy session and Friars Club roast for the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of "The Armies of the Night" and "The Executioner's Song."
Talk-show host Charlie Rose served as master of ceremonies, while speakers praising Mailer, who died in November at 84, included such famous names as magazine publisher Tina Brown, fellow authors Joan Didion and Don DeLillo and actor Sean Penn, who read a brief statement from his Blackberry that he had composed.
The warmest drama, and wickedest comedy, came from Mailer's children _ nine of them, plus a stepson _ all of whom seem to have inherited his storytelling power, if not his booming physical presence.
Mailer, the writer, was a Hemingwayesque tumbler of fear and boasting, bound to write The Great American Novel even as he grunted over comma placement and wondered each morning if he had the stuff to fill a page.
Mailer, the father, was a Hemingwayesque patriarch _ daring his offspring to risk death, conquer fear, startle their minds, question authority and "get to know each other under dire circumstances," recalled daughter Kate Mailer, who began her speech by reflecting on her teenage years and lamenting: "It is hard to rebel against your father when your father is Norman Mailer."
Son Stephen Mailer, an actor, referred to himself as the "wild card" of the family as he channeled his late father, falling to the floor and then rising in character as Norman Mailer, ambling to the podium and calling out, "Can you hear me in the back?"
Mailer, it was revealed, distrusted garlic, hated plastic, TV commercials and false piety. He loved pot roast, oysters and Hershey's chocolate. He encouraged, scolded, terrified and comforted.
Kate Mailer spoke of an especially dangerous mountain pass that she refused to cross as a teenager, pleading that she wanted to survive long enough to have a boyfriend.
Cross it, her father assured her, and she would get a better boyfriend.
Family, friends and peers referred to his courage, his influence, his dedication, his sea-blue eyes, his many wives (six). Son Matthew Mailer remembered a wedding toast from his father that began, "If this marriage works out ..."
Adjectives rolled like tears: "Brilliant and exasperating" (novelist William Kennedy), "ambitious to the point of vertigo" (Didion), "loud, loquacious and self-promoting," but also "warm, affable, lovable and funny" (Lonnie Ali, wife of Muhammad Ali).
A video tribute featured interviews with Mailer over the decades, his curly hair turning from black to white, the wars he opposed shifting from Vietnam to Iraq. Musical interludes included a trombone solo, "Requiem for a Boxer," all flutters and echoes, feints and jabs; and a moody torch song, "You'll Come Back (You Always Do)," co-written by Mailer and sung by Norris Church Mailer, his wife for his last 27 years.
His children described his final months _ frail, but unbeaten. They remembered sneaking him a rum and orange juice that he managed to sip, despite being attached to a breathing tube.
Death was the enemy, an appointment he meant to delay. He read "The Iliad" and likened himself to a Greek warrior. He brought in books about Hitler to the hospital for a planned sequel to his last novel, "The Castle in the Forest," even as everyone, including Mailer, surely knew that he wouldn't live to write it.
Even in dreams, he plotted. Lawrence Schiller, Mailer's collaborator on "The Executioner's Song," said he visited Mailer last year when the author was just out of surgery. Mailer, whose first novel was "The Naked and the Dead," told him that he had had a dream in which Schiller was the devil and Mailer was God. But Schiller shouldn't worry, Mailer added, because God and the devil had made peace and agreed to fight the greatest evil: technology.
The family announced at the end of the memorial that a charitable foundation had been established in Mailer's honor to finance a writer's colony in his longtime hometown, Provincetown, Mass. Board members include Didion, Nobel laureate Guenter Grass and Pulitzer Prize winners Kennedy and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
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HILLEL ITALIE | April 10, 2008 08:28 AM EST |