BIRTHDAY-PARTY POLITICS
Barber, Benjamin R.
This past winter, while the rest of the country was marking off the troubled months with an inauguration, POW returns, and sky-rocketing food prices, adult New York, or a part of it, was...
...Getting to be middleaged has become a full-time occupation for educated American men, perhaps because many of them face their fortieth or fiftieth birthdays half-way through what they take to be their adolescence, not yet having quite achieved the potency of postpubescent maturity yet already up against the impotence of old age...
...who will be a heavy later in the evening...
...Not a bad movie, all things considered...
...No wonder our children don't want to grow up...
...Coming downtown I see a good deal of that other New York that rarely gets to East Side movies, hardly ever visits the Metropolitan Museum, and will never be invited to Norman Mailer's birthday party: unemployed black drop-outs sitting on sidestreet stoops, self-orphaned suburban runaways peeping from ground-floor crashpads, harried waitresses from Tennessee and Kansas kept alive by a dimming faith in next week's open audition, underpaid teachers walking their guard dogs, wary cops only slightly less bitter than the minority populations they are supposed to protect, and God knows who's more scared of whom...
...First the pushing and shoving around the bar, the nibbling at a dreadful buffet, and the craning necks and peering eyes searching out the packed house for other self-respecting celebrities whose presence will justify one's own...
...The New York Post editor behind me in the cloakroom figures it's been a good party, which is all he ever figured it for in the first place so he's not complaining...
...get together into some kind of steering committee...
...Some one challenge me...
...So are Jacob Javits, Andy Warhol, Jack Lemmon, Sonny Rollins, Lady Jean Campbell, and Princess Egon von Furstenburg...
...Ya know, I've been to better Bar Mitzvahs than this...
...He is settling in with a few friends at a large table and making it his party...
...Dirty this time...
...It's a clever game, Mailer talking about how good his idea is without yet revealing what the idea actually is...
...And of course Bertolucci, Last Tango's director...
...And here is Mailer at it again, another milestone in his lugubrious journey from private literacy to public buf foonery...
...or the preview screenings for NOTEBOOK Last Tango where even the critics had to know somebody to get in...
...Mailer is across the room, receiving birthday congratulations, much more attractive in this avuncular role than he will be later as a pretend statesman...
...He's still calling for questions...
...cries Mailer and launches abruptly into another joke...
...It was birthday-party politics at its worst...
...Breslin knows as well...
...A jaded voice from the rear accommodates him: "How about paranoia Norman...
...The swarming photographers even eye me, weighing the odds, a wasted frame against a missed shot of someone who might turn out to be Alan Bates's brother or Jose Torres's new publicity manager...
...Giggle...
...I want questions," he's shouting, "not just any questions, I want hostile questions...
...Snickers and overly-appreciative groans bounce knowingly around the room in a sound remarkably like the one that greets Brando in Tango when, leering at his own groin, he urges Maria Schneider to regard his organ as her happiness...
...No dirty jokes...
...And Dotson Rader (remember Columbia in '68, Rader's I Ain't Marchin' Anymore...
...No free bar where you can't get a drink...
...no, don't get him wrong, it's not the Press he's defending, they deserve whatever they get...
...An exchange in homely Spanish with the bartender, and his friends' glasses are immediately refilled...
...They are streaming in and it's only 10:30...
...And the arrogance with which uselessness is construed as virtue...
...New York alone knows, because it has made Last Tango into an event whose significance bears no relationship to the film as film...
...And the cheapness with which that insensibility mimics conscience and is allowed to posture as political action...
...a counter-FBI...
...Which ipso facto makes it "the best Idea I have ever had...
...Breslin is clearly the man to be drinking with, but Torres is the only one getting any drinks...
...Because it's not really their city, the city that will pay $50 to see what Mailer's dreamed up now, the city defined by the Colony Club and Chase Manhatten and the New York Review of Books and Elaine's and Lincoln Center and the Village Voice and Central Park South and, if he's a good looker like Lindsay, the mayor, and the Times and the Rockefellers and (the cab is pulling up in front of its tinted plate-glass facade) the Four Seasons...
...Jimmy Breslin is 346 an early comer, which is how I find the swamped, undertended bar where a polite struggle for drinks will be waged all night...
...But the an nouncement comes later...
...Javits pushes a lady off his lap and leaves with an alacrity that suggests he wishes he had left ten minutes earlier...
...but then he's been fifty for quite a while, and he looked tired to me in 1968...
...And announcement or not, it's supposed to be a party isn't it...
...Dotson Rader sees his opportunity slipping away, and charges Mailer at the podium, his leather jacket quivering as he shoves home his points...
...Mailer's gonna investigate the man who investigates the man who .. . What's left of the party picks up—moving back toward the bar and the kitchen...
...The snobbery all went home with the guests...
...Everyone here is apparently someone...
...to set up a foundation...
...Ya mean that's the idea...
...Mailer's followup news conference the next afternoon is apparently only a news conference...
...There were even critics who couldn't get in, which seemed to convince those who did that Last Tango was more than just a good movie: it was, said Pauline Kael, a "landmark in film history...
...Yet at the same time they take the idea, the announcement, too lightly, like Little Orphan Annie had said something cute about pogroms...
...People are looking at each other with that speechless self-consciousness that denotes a common discomfort...
...He knows he's losing them: friends are looking pained and rivals are looking contemptuous while everybody else is looking for the exits...
...Curiosity, interest, drama have to build slowly on a foundation of clinking glasses and cocktail chatter...
...asks someone who has apparently missed the whole point about Mailer's emancipation from ego...
...and a certain postclimactic weariness sets instantly in...
...But it's not their party...
...The crowd won't shut up...
...It's not just another New York party, it's an event...
...Dotson Rader, his studiedly anachronistic black leather jacket capturing the center of the room, gets into a real question, an involuted political analysis even less clear than Mailer's announcement...
...Mailer listens and grins (at least somebody is challenging him, taking him seriously) and the indefatigable Press press in, hop 348 ing for some private bit that might save their stories or justify their evening or redeem their lives...
...New York's Other America...
...It's pretty noisy now ("What'd he say...
...UNTIL NOW only snobbery has been in the air...
...For Mailer has come to think of himself, in that peculiar New York way, as a critical American institution whose personal destiny is hardly to be distinguished from America's public fate...
...there is a lot of fiftyish malemenopausal humor here tonight—the middleaged exhibitionist caught somewhere between genital bravado and fears of impotence...
...With the approach of the announcement an atmosphere of impudence wafts in...
...No moonshots without Mailer's reinterpretations, no prizefights without Mailer's recreations, no political conventions without Mailer's restagings...
...Not that Mailer's through...
...George Plimpton knows Mailer won't be back...
...We need" comes his voice, floating out over this increasingly indifferent sea of $50 faces, "we need to get together here...
...It's time to go home...
...The $50 seems an irresistible magnet—like the price tags on Last Tango and the Met's krater...
...Mailer is moving toward the main moment, the essential announcement...
...The insensibility of good intentions in responding to real suffering in America...
...He's looking to grab his audience obliquely, deploying a joke or two like any after-dinner speaker...
...an an nouncement of national importance (major...
...Or take the pot: an exquisite krater from the hand of the ancient master Euphronios...
...I am in a taxi, heading for the Four Seasons, guest of a legitimate invitee...
...It's all over now...
...Just as the crisis in the cities is "over" because Richard Nixon says it is over...
...George Plimpton, whose presence certifies the evening as an event, has come early to stay late...
...Self-promotions have a way of rubbing off on one another, producing a symbiotic static from which both derive energy—mirrors mirroring mirrors...
...He really means it...
...And Charlie Mingus, Paul Desmond, Bobby Short, and what must be the entire staff of the Village Voice...
...a citizen's CIA...
...Which quickly attracted the rival attentions of the New York Times and the Italian government, the latter quick to note the disappearance of a Euphronios krater from its Etruscan graveyard treasures...
...The Euphronios krater is different: Thomas Hoving paid exactly $1 million for it...
...In response to which she allows as to how her new stud likes it just fine "once he gets beyond the worn-out part...
...Nevertheless, there are quite a few pots at the Met, and none has drawn long lines or frontpage headlines...
...Mailer's on to something else now, something about no more pictures thank you because the flashbulbs make him feel too much like Nixon's eyeballs . . . but it's getting hard to follow Mailer over the rising chatter of a crowd that NOTEBOOK appears already to have concluded that Mailer is probably too drunk or kinky or put-on or far-out to really say anything of national importance (major...
...Mailer can't make out Rader any better than we can and he's suggesting a half-hour break to ponder his idea...
...Four or five hundred citizens of this New York have bought into Mailer's circus...
...No, no...
...But this isn't the American Political Science Association taking a coffee break between phases of a survey research panel, and everyone knows Mailer won't be back...
...Each of these events involved names, money, promotion, "importance...
...lots of money, relatively speaking ($5.00 for a movie is as voguishly outrageous as $1 million for a pot, which is not much less astonishing than $50.00 for a birthday party even when it's Norman Mailer's...
...That is, prestigious stars whose names lent to the events a status that in turn enhanced their names...
...The impotence of class and money and literacy in the face of real power in America...
...Nobody wants to appear too pleased at being present ("for $50 ya gotta wait a half hour for a drink...
...It's about this amiable divorcee whose ex-husband wants to know how her new lover likes (in Mailer's unparaphrasable prose) "sticking it up her worn-out old pussy...
...After all, Bates and Torres are here...
...This past winter, while the rest of the country was marking off the troubled months with an inauguration, POW returns, and sky-rocketing food prices, adult New York, or a part of it, was occupying its days with a fornicating Marlon Brando, a million-dollar vase, and a birthday party for Norman Mailer—a movie, a pot, and a soiree...
...That seems pretty hostile to me, but it's apparently too friendly for Mailer...
...Take the movie, Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris: it's another cinematic tale about a menopausal male wrestling with his vacant middle years—this time egged on by his wife's suicide and a decidely anal affair with a sexy young girl...
...But he's not Jose Torres and the Senator has to wait, settling eventually for a Scotch in place of the Brandy he wants...
...There's a little nudity, some splenetic cursing in the genital mode, and a brief bout with sodomy, hardly worthy of mention in the era of Deep Throat...
...her "ha-penis," get it...
...and an aura of precedentshattering "importance" wildly disproportionate to any actual impact on the life of our nation...
...And the naivete with which that impotence is disguised as charm and refurbished as style...
...Or take the party, Norman Mailer's fiftieth, one of those New York happenings that manages to vindicate all the worn middle-American stereotypes about big-city arrogance, impotent sophistication, and literary pusilanimity that seem too obvious to be true...
...The crowd is listening again, drawn in by these antics...
...some kind of foundation to investigate the CIA...
...But they have also distorted the self-image of the man...
...Making it means being here, and the made are all here: the media, the Voice, literate prizefighters, society dames, jazz greats, socially aware actors, hip politicians (tempered by prudence: Javits leaves when Mailer starts talking and McCarthy arrives when Mailer stops), and journalists...
...Voices ebb and he plunges into his announcement: "For once I have had a political idea that has nothing to do with myself," he proclaims, as if this liberation from his ego might finally in and of itself produce a solution to the nation's crises...
...but everyone is really tickled pink...
...Mailer demands silence, appealing winningly to the $50 everyone paid to hear him...
...And long...
...Three months later Mailer will devote eight lead pages of the New York Review of Books to some guardedly exuberant reflections on Bertolucci's Last Tango...
...Breslin knows better than to expect a hush from this gathering, but the milling does subside some and Mailer takes the podium...
...And Paul O'Dwyer, possibly the only politician not running for mayor, and later Gene McCarthy...
...self-promotion whose success seemed to depend primarily on shamelessness...
...Jimmy Breslin is at the mike trying to introduce Mailer...
...to investigate the investigators...
...And so, "importance" creeps in...
...it says...
...The Senator looks terribly tired, tired of parties, tired of events, tired of politics...
...Only it's awfully difficult to hear him...
...Investigate the who...
...In fact, every journalist is a paying guest and every guest a potential journalist...
...What are we doing hear darling...
...But Norman Mailer doesn't ease timidly into anything...
...The best of the grownups, reaching fifty, seem only to want to be children again, wishing goodness into being, shooting down the bad guys wtih nothing more than a cocked finger, talking away their brother's tears with fables, glossing a hostile outside world whose realities are too grim yet to be countenanced— and having such a good time all the while...
...Because the overblown sodomist (no pun intended) in the film is Marlon Brando...
...Like Bernstein's fling with the Panthers in an East Side living room...
...Not that Mailer's literary mirrors haven't been brilliant, often more interesting than the events they are intended to reflect...
...No $50 come-ons...
...As if nobody really believes Mailer's voice is more interesting than his own...
...Mailer seems on the brink of sexual bathos—if only we fifty-year-olds can get it up America will stop falling down—and is rushing on with vague passion about the growing dangers of totalitarianism, the need to combat the insidious powers of the CIA and the FBI...
...Reservationonly tickets were on sale at $5.00 a head and shows were limited to two per day thus guaranteeing "sold-out" houses for months...
...he demands...
...But the effeteness lingers still...
...He's back in the other room trying to get Gene McCarthy a drink ("fer Christ sake, give the Senator a drink huh...
...So, just as the movie becomes a cause célèbre, the pot becomes an international incident...
...Something about how people are saying the $50 contributions have been ear-marked for his vasectomy...
...It's no wonder so many men ease timidly into their fifties...
...And so, Mailer seizes on his fiftieth birthday and transforms it into an event: he rents New York's classiest tourist restaurant (the Four Seasons), sends invitations to several thousand people soliciting $50 per couple, and promises to make every paying guest privy to "an announcement of national importance (major) ." IT'S an early February night, a chilly Monday...
...Sensing the crowd's dedicated narcissism, he starts yelling goodnaturedly about how Mailer's books will still be read a hundred years from now, which is more than he can say for anybody else's books, so why doesn't everybody pipe down and listen to Mailer...
...to investigate the FBI...
...This is dropping out on a colossal scale, a NOTEBOOK true trahison des clercs that leaves the solution of real political and economic dilemmas to those sorry semiadults who have somehow achieved all the hard realism and self-discipline of maturity without any of its saving wisdom or humility...
...And Shirley McLaine and Rod Steiger and Murray Kempton...
...Then I'll be back to answer really serious questions...
...But the papers the next day take the event much too staidly, too glumly, as if Consumer Reports had done a special number on Diesel generators...
...But the laughter is uncertain and nobody knows what the hell Mailer is talking about...
...What did the invitation say...
...His opening is uncertain, affably sloppy...
...Yet Last Tango swept into New York on a wave of publicity so irresistible that not even the senses of usually sturdy critics were left standing...
...The uselessness of adolescent rage in addressing real evil in America...
...Hey, ya gonna run for mayor again Norman...
...or the thing at Town Hall with Mailer up against the feminists where Jill Johnston of the Voice ended up making love (sort of) to some female friends on stage...
...For free many of them might not have come, least of all the masochistic press which seems almost pleased to have paid...
...For all the talent and wealth and status, there was no hope for America at the Four Seasons that Monday night in February...
...It's not just an ego trip because, he remonstrates, "I am much too vain, incompetent, and stupid to give the kind of leadership my idea requires...
...The point is," he's saying, reaching desperately for some metaphoric semblance of continuity, "I want to get by your worn-out old brains with this new idea...
...Important because Mailer says it's important...
...For $50, that's the idea...
Vol. 20 • July 1973 • No. 3
