Dick Cavett: In This Corner, Norman Mailer.

[laststeamtrain]

In This Corner, Norman Mailer

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

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I was to see the Mailer pugilist-walk once more in my life, about a decade later and in a then-unimaginable setting: my late-night show on ABC. It was in 1971, and it was without doubt the damnedest show I ever did. Or ever heard of.

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(transcript of Gore Vidal & Mailer going at it.)

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All of us still spoke and both men were — singly — on later shows of mine. Not together, but on. Vidal said his relationship with Mailer finally resolved itself into pretty much what it had been for decades: “We pass, and like two old whores on the street, say ‘Still at it, Norm?’ ‘Yep. Still at it, Gore?’ ”

What with Norman dead, in going over that transcript I feel twinges of guilt about not having treated him nicer, but what the hell? He wasn’t dead then. And he certainly asked for it and gave as good as he got.

My affection for him has never faded and I saw him many times after that. And God knows, the man who could write a book called “Advertisements for Myself” got huge delight out of the evening’s notoriety. He claimed that after that show he got more mail than in the rest of his career put together, adding, laughingly, “and some of it was even on my side.”

I know someone who sure as hell hates being dead.

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http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/in-this-corn...