November 20, 1960: Norman Mailer Stabs His Wife

November 20, 1960: Novelist Norman Mailer stabs his wife at a party they were hosting -- and, for all intents and purposes, he gets away with it.

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, Monmouth County, New Jersey, he was, for want of a better choice of words, raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and graduated from Harvard University. He served in the Pacific Theater of World War II, as a typist at a regimental headquarters, then a wire lineman, then volunteered for a reconnaissance platoon, seeing combat, and finally as a cook. He was discharged with the rank of Sergeant, and said that being in the U.S. Army was "the worst experience of my life, and also the most important."

It led to the publication of his 1st novel in 1948, The Naked and the Dead. It sold over 1 million copies in its 1st year, and has been called the 1st great novel about World War II. (Not the greatest, but, chronologically, the first one that could be called "great.") He was 25 years old, and already a literary superstar.

His subsequent novels did not sell as well, nor were received as well. While still writing fiction, he turned to journalism, becoming one of the co-founders of The Village Voice, New York City's "alternative weekly" newspaper, in 1955.

In 1957, the magazine Dissent published his essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, connecting what Mailer called the "psychic havoc" wrought by the Holocaust and the Cold War to the aftermath of slavery in America, in the figuration of the Hipster. The essay was a call to abandon the numbing culture of conformity during the Administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It wasn't Mailer (I've been unable to find out who it was) who labeled it "the Ike Age," as a "cold" period like an "ice age," but that is the kind of thing Mailer would have thought of. Instead, much like the "Beat Generation" writers like Jack Kerouac (whose novel On the Road came out that year) and Allen Ginsberg (whose poem Howl, published the year before, was even more in-your-face about it), Mailer wanted Americans to rebel, to seek out new forms of entertainment, and to be more sexually liberated, things he associated with black American culture.

The essay's reviews were mixed: While black activist Eldridge Cleaver liked it, it was ripped by black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and even the white and Jewish Ginsberg himself, whom, due to his open defiance of just about every Judeo-Christian ethic there was, Mailer had previously called "the most courageous man in America."

In 1960, Mailer covered the Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine, writing a very complimentary story about John F. Kennedy, titled Superman Goes to the Supermarket. Along with the works of Tom Wolfe, it is considered one of the foundations of what became known as the New Journalism.

Mailer married 6 times, having 8 children. His 1st marriage, to Beatrice Silverman, ended in 1952 because he was having an affair with painter and actress Adele Morales, a New York native with a Spanish mother and a Peruvian father. Norman and Adele married in 1954, and had 2 daughters, Danielle and Elizabeth.

Inspired by Kennedy's recent election as President, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York in the next year's election. On November 19, 1960, he hosted a party at the Upper West Side apartment he shared with Adele and their daughters. Mailer had enlisted his well-connected friend, journalist George Plimpton, to attract figures from the city's "power structure." The idea was to use this party to unite these people with what he saw as his base, the "disenfranchised" people of the City -- most of whom couldn't have given a damn about who the Mayor was.

David Rockefeller, America's leading banker, and the brother of Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, declined his invitation. But Ginsberg showed up. So did several people described by an account years later as "derelicts, cut-throats and bohemians." A friend of Mailer's who was there, publisher Barney Rosset, called it "the most dangerous evening I've ever spent in my life."

Fights broke out. This pleased the increasingly drunk Mailer, who fancied himself both a "man's man" and a "ladies' man," enjoyed drinking copiously, and also enjoyed challenging people to get into a boxing ring and fight him. These were all traits he shared with his literary (including journalistic) idol, Ernest Hemingway, still alive at that point. Adele later said that he left the apartment, "almost incoherent." She said, "He was down in the street, punching people," and, "He didn't know what his name was. He was so out of it."

At 4:30 AM, November 20, he came back into the apartment. Only 6 guests remained, and Adele was getting ready for bed. Adele mocked his, as we would say today, "toxic masculinity." She also made a reference to his mistress, who may or may not have actually existed. His rage peaking, he took out a rusty 2 1/2-inch penknife, and stabbed Adele through the breast, narrowly missing her heart; then stabbed her in the back. He walked out of the room, and told the remaining guests, "Don't touch her. Let the bitch die."

She was taken to University Hospital, underwent emergency surgery, and made a quick recovery. The next day, with the story not yet having hit the newspapers, Mailer appeared, as previously scheduled, for an interview on The Mike Wallace Show. He advertised his mayoral bid, and spoke of a knife as "a symbol of manhood." Wallace, one of the finest journalists in CBS history, did not yet know what Mailer had done.

At first, Adele said that she was wounded by falling on some broken glass. Two days after the stabbing, she admitted that Mailer had done it. Mailer was at the hospital, and the police arrested him. Based on her account of his state of mind at the time of the stabbing, he was involuntarily committed to Bellevue Hospital, home of the most famous (or infamous, if you prefer) psychiatric ward in America. He was released after 17 days.

Mailer cut a deal, pleading guilty to a reduced charge of assault, saying, "I feel I did a lousy, dirty, cowardly thing." He was sentenced to 3 years' probation, but no prison time, unless you count the 17 days at Bellevue. He had tried to kill his wife, and, essentially, he got away with it.

Mailer did not officially run for Mayor of New York in 1961. That year, his hero, Hemingway, committed suicide. Mailer was never going to do that -- at least, not intentionally. His ego prevented that. Adele divorced him in 1962. In 1967, he covered the antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon, publishing The Armies of the Night, one of his most-lauded works. His stabbing of his then-wife seemed to have been forgotten.

In 1969, he finally ran for Mayor, with a platform of making New York City the 51st State -- which would have cut Long Island off from the rest of the State of New York, and would have forced either the old State or the new one to change its name -- and banning private cars from Manhattan Island. He came up with bold campaign slogans: "No more bullshit!" and "The other guys are the joke." As his running mate, for the office of President of the City Council, he enlisted a real journalist, New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin.

In the Democratic Primary on June 17, the Mailer-Breslin ticket got 41,288 votes, good for 5 percent of the popular vote, finishing 4th out of 5 tickets. It actually got 10 percent of the vote in Manhattan, but no more than 4 percent in any other Borough. Since Mailer's candidacy wasn't taken seriously by anybody, his stabbing of his wife never became an issue. City Comptroller Mario Procaccino won the nomination, and lost the general election to the incumbent Mayor, John Lindsay. Neither Mailer nor Breslin ever ran for office again.

Mailer continued writing controversial books, and became the target of the wrath of feminists. I wanted to say, "If a writer of similar profile today..." but realized that I couldn't finish that sentence. No writer today has a similar profile to Norman Mailer. Or the aforementioned James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe, or Truman Capote, or Gore Vidal, whom Mailer once head-butted backstage when they were both guests on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971. All of those men blurred the line between novel-writing and journalism in the 1960s. Nobody has done that in the 21st Century.

Writers simply aren't the kind of celebrities in the age of mass media, including social media, that they were in 1960, or even in 1970. Case in point: In 1980, Johnny Carson cut The Tonight Show from 90 to 60 minutes. Before, he had frequently had writers on the show. Afterward, because he couldn't do a 15-to-20-minute in-depth interview, broken up by a commercial or two, authors' appearances on his show became considerably rarer. Mailer appeared on the show in 1969, 1972 and 1974, but only once after the shift to 60 minutes, in 1985.

(Carson had Capote on 19 times, the last in 1976. Capote's substance abuse issues got worse, and he died in 1984. Vidal was luckier: Carson had him on 25 times, 7 after the shift. Wolfe appeared twice, both in 1980, right before the shift. Baldwin, Kerouac and Ginsberg never appeared on The Tonight Show.)

However, having seen what happened with football star-turned-actor O.J. Simpson in 1994, if a person, in any field, having a similar level of fame, tried to kill his wife now, he would be instantly "canceled," well before he went to trial.

In 1997, Adele Morales published The Last Party, detailing the near-fatal night in 1960. In a 2000 interview, Mailer called stabbing Adele "the one act I can look back on and regret for the rest of my life." It was his only public expression of remorse for the act. He died in 2007, at age 84. In their headline for his obituary, The New York Times called him a "Towering Writer with Ego to Match." He was actually just 5-foot-8, but his effect on writing was huge, as was his ego.

Adele died in 2015, at age 90. With considerable irony, she was, as far as I can determine, the last living person who was at that party. (Had he accepted his invitation, it could have been David Rockefeller, who lived until 2017, age 101.) Of her daughters with Norman, Danielle, a.k.a. Dandy, is a painter; and Elizabeth, a.k.a. Betsy, is a writer.

Left to right: Adele Morales, Betsy Mailer, Dandy Mailer, in 2011

Perhaps Mailer's real idol should have been King Henry VIII of England. After all, he married 6 women, and mistreated all of them. However, while Henry had 2 of his wives killed, 1 more than Norman tried, Henry never had the guts, or the insanity, to do it himself, while Norman did. But Norman was rightly committed for it, something that only happened to one King of England, and it was George III, not Henry VIII.

From his 1st marriage, Norman had a daughter, Susan, who is, perhaps with more irony, a psychoanalyst. She wrote a book about her relationship with her father. From his 3rd marriage, Norman had a daughter, Kate, an actress. From his 4th marriage, Norman had 2 sons, producer Michael and actor Stephen. From his 5th marriage, Norman had a daughter, Maggie, a painter. And from his 6th and last marriage, he had a son, John Buffalo Mailer, a writer and actor.

*

November 20, 1960 was a Sunday. Baseball season was over. These games were played in the NFL:

* The New York Giants lost to the Philadelphia Eagles, 17-10 at Yankee Stadium. This was the game where the Eagles' Chuck Bednarik knocked the Giants' Frank Gifford out of the game with perhaps the most famous hit in football history, a key event in the Eagles' run to the NFL Championship that year. I have a separate entry for that event.

* The football version of the St. Louis Cardinals, who had been in Chicago until this season, beat the Washington Redskins, 26-14 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The Pittsburgh Steelers beat their arch-rivals, the Cleveland Browns, 14-10 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

* The Chicago Bears beat the Detroit Lions, 28-7 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The Los Angeles Rams beat the Green Bay Packers, 33-31 at Milwaukee County Stadium.

* The San Francisco 49ers beat the Dallas Cowboys, 26-14 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. The Cowboys, a 1st-year expansion team, went 0-11-1 that 1st season. Their only non-loss was a tie against the Giants at Yankee Stadium.

* Since there were now 13 teams in the NFL, one team had to have a bye week every week. This week, it was the Baltimore Colts.

This was the 1st season of the American Football League. These were their games on the day:

* The Houston Oilers beat the Denver Broncos, 20-10 at Jeppesen Stadium in Houston.

* The Buffalo Bills beat the Los Angeles Chargers, 32-3 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

* The Boston Patriots, the Dallas Texans, the New York Titans and the Oakland Raiders -- the teams now known as the New England Patriots, the Kansas City Chiefs, the New York Jets and the Las Vegas Raiders -- had irregular schedules, and did not play on November 20.

There were 2 games in the NBA. The Boston Celtics beat the Cincinnati Royals, 120-103 at the Cincinnati Gardens. And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Detroit Pistons, 135-131 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. Elgin Baylor scored 52 points for the Lakers.

And the entire NHL, the "Original Six," was in action. The New York Rangers lost to the Detroit Red Wings, 4-3 at the old Madison Square Garden. The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Boston Bruins, 3-2 at the Boston Garden. And the Montreal Canadiens and the Chicago Black Hawks played to a tie, 1-1 at the Chicago Stadium.