Books by the Buddy System

By Richard Lacayo/Provincetown Monday, Apr. 29, 2002
    • Even if you keep in mind that Norman Mailer will turn 80 in January, you still pause when he puts a hearing aid behind each of those notable ears. "The body is like an old boat in stormy seas," he shrugs. "To stay afloat, you keep throwing ballast overboard. All the senses go--hearing, eyesight, smell."

    Some things stay. The cartwheeling mind, the august manner--Mailer still has those. The cerebral tough guy who wrote The Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song works daily on a long novel, though he won't say what it's about. He and his wife Norris Church share a big, brick house in Provincetown, Mass., on the tip of Cape Cod. Lumbering around the kitchen to fix you a tuna sandwich, he explains why Provincetown is a good place to concentrate: "Most of the people we knew up here are dead. We don't have to go out much."


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    Mailer will go out this week, though. He is promoting Into the Mirror, a book about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent arrested last year after 20 years of turning over secrets to the Russians. Turncoats are a natural subject for Mailer, who has always behaved like a man in no hurry to dispose of his own paradoxes and whose last big novel, Harlot's Ghost, was a meditation on the CIA. But Into the Mirror is not exactly by Mailer. It's a novelization by Lawrence Schiller of a Mailer screenplay, based on interviews they both conducted. In July, Schiller begins shooting a TV mini-series for cbs from Mailer's script.

    Schiller sits across from Mailer now. A heavyset man with an amiable-anxious manner, he has worked with Mailer on four previous books. "It wasn't an easy road to travel with both our egos," Schiller says. It was Schiller who brought Mailer the interviews that were the seed of Mailer's last indisputably great work, The Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore's path to death row. Schiller figures in the book as one of the media carnivores who moved in on the story. Even if you don't count the chapter in which Schiller has diarrhea, it is not a pretty picture. Schiller says he's fine with it: "I got through that. I was no longer afraid of somebody writing strongly about me." Mailer turns to agree: "There's a subtle strength when you recognize that you no longer have to support an image of yourself."

    So this is not just any friendship. It is also a fair specimen of passive aggression. Schiller, 65, has been treated for years as a world-historical ambulance chaser. A onetime photojournalist, he has made a career of tracking down the people involved in the great public squalors of our time--the Kennedy assassination, the Manson murders, the O.J. Simpson trial--then fashioning their stories into books and TV movies that he directs. He got Jack Ruby's deathbed interview. He co-wrote Simpson's self-serving jailhouse book, I Want to Tell You. For many of those years, Mailer has been Schiller's mentor, older brother and ticket to ride. But lately the balance of power may have shifted a bit. Schiller co-wrote a best seller about the Simpson trial, American Tragedy, with former TIME correspondent James Willwerth. Widely considered the best of the Simpson books, it won Schiller some of the respect toward which he has been struggling all his life. Meanwhile, Mailer's last book, The Gospel According to the Son, was, to put it mildly, not well received. In their previous collaborations, Mailer did the writing. On their new book, it's Schiller, who for good measure is so wildly productive that in September he will publish Cape May Court House, about a car crash that may have been a cover for murder. Posterity will have the final say, and we can assure you which way it will go, but for now it's Schiller who can preen.

    Hanssen's story is irresistible. The archconservative son of a Chicago cop, he worked diligently for the Russians. An ultra-orthodox Catholic, he sent nude pictures of his wife to his best friend and, in one of the weirdest discoveries of the Mailer/Schiller research, proposed that his friend use the date-rape drug Rohypnol to seduce her. No mere diagnosis of "mental disorder," says Mailer, could begin to grasp the man's complexities: "There are great holes in formal psychology. Hanssen just blazes through them."

    Schiller distills Hanssen's story to the torments that fascinate Mailer: guilt, subterfuge, sex and hubris. He lifts dialogue from Mailer's screenplay and incorporates some of Mailer's imagined scenes. If his serviceable prose were any match for Hanssen's intricacies, this might be a book to be reckoned with. But Schiller's real gift is for gathering information. And in the face of Hanssen's spectacular contradictions, mere facts drop to the floor.

    It's a problem that Schiller's film may solve. And if the right opportunity comes along, don't doubt that Mailer will work with Schiller again. Which one needs the other more is an unsettled question. Maybe it always was. Mailer looks at Schiller: "I was always intrigued by what a phenomenon you were." Schiller beams. The feeling is mutual.