“He was interesting, because he was interested… We both dislike the same things about our native land so we had lots to talk about.” – Gore Vidal, an author and friend that Mailer once socked in the mouth. Mailer died at 84 from kidney failure on Sunday.
Mailer and Rip Torn got into a full-on brawl in the 1970 Mailer directed film, “Maidstone.”
From “The Lives of Norman Mailer” by Carl Rollyson:
“Outraged by the way Mailer had tricked everyone into thinking a film of novel significance was in the offing, Torn refused to accept the ending of MAIDSTONE and attacked Mailer during the filming of him with his family the day after the director had declared the movie over. Charging Mailer in an open field, Torn hit him three times with the flat side of a hammer, pulling his blows but doing enough damage to draw blood. Four of Mailer’s children — Dandy, Betsy, Michael, and Stephen — were terrified, screaming after Torn’s assault on their father.
Mailer was furious. Calling Torn a “crazy fool cocksucker”, Mailer wrestled him to the ground, biting & nearly tearing off Torn’s ear. Calling Mailer “brother” and insisting the film would make no sense without the assassination attempt, Torn traded insults with Mailer and yet kept reminding him that this was the story Mailer had planned, that Mailer had even seen him coming with the hammer and had not tried to get away.
When Mailer would not acknowledge the justice of Torn’s words, Torn called him a “fraud”, a charge Mailer later had to countenance, for in the editing room he found that he did not have a movie without the dramatic explosion, the assault not only on Norman T. Kingsley but on Norman Mailer, the half-sincere, half-bogus filmmaker and politician who had to be called to account by a real actor who took his role seriously, as though he were, in Mailer’s words, his “true brother”.
The psychological reality of MAIDSTONE was the actors’ expectation that Mailer would be attacked, and so Torn “attacked out of all the plots of other actors” and became, Mailer realized, “the presence of the film, the psychological reality that became a literal reality out of the pressure of all the ones which did not.”
People think of Mailer as the pugnacious author of chauvinistic books (he did stab his second wife, a fiery Latin-American beauty called Adele Morales, with a kitchen knife during a fight), but Mailer was also an accomplished journalist and (s0metimes experimental) filmmaker. He directed the films, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” “Beyond the Law,” “Wild 90” (written by D.A. Pennebaker) and the aforementioned “Maidstone.” He also wrote Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear,” a script which Mailer thought the French cineaste butchered and then recently said, “Jean-Luc Godard may well be the third most awful man I’ve met in my life,” on the eve of his film retrospective at New York’s Anthology Film Archive back in July. This NYTimes piece on the aforementioned Mailer film retrospective is a good read.
Mailer also acted, having appeared most recently in Matthew Barney’s (Bjork’s baby daddy)pretentious and surrealist “Cremaster 2,” playing himself on “Gilmore Girls” and also had roles in “King Lear” and Milos Forman’s “Ragtime.” Oh yeah, Mailer also called Timothy Leary a “vapid asshole.”