How Norris Got a New Kitchen
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), pp. 4–5; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), pp. 4–5.
My uncle Norman was always coming up with theories about the world, hypotheses for how things worked — and when it came to gambling, a family affliction that he inherited from his father (and my grandfather) Barney Mailer, he was partial to systems that fit into a theory. Part of the excitement of being around Norman was listening to him riff on some new idea. It was like watching a fireworks show, his mind igniting in beautiful and breathtaking colors, none of them predictable. His theories were brilliant, outlandish, ridiculous — and always provocative.
One of the more out-there notions he developed involved the pseudoscience of biorhythms, a theory first introduced in the 1800s by a German physician, Willem Fliess, who believed that a person’s life is made up of 23- and 28-day cycles in which energy fluctuates up and down in patterns that can be predicted based on a person’s date of birth. In the early 1970s, biorhythms came into vogue again, and Norman was very taken with the possibilities. He decided that if applied to sports, biorhythms might help explain why athletes had good days and bad days. For a gambler, the knowledge that a baseball pitcher was going to have a down day would be invaluable. So it was, armed with a pocket-sized biorhythms calculator purchased from a mail-order catalog, that Norman started charting the biorhythms of major league pitchers in order to put his theory to the test.
The key was to find pitching matchups in which one pitcher was predicted to have an up day in all three biorhythm categories — physical, emotional, and intellectual — while the opposing pitcher was predicted to have a down day in all three. Cataloging and charting this information proved both boring and time-consuming, and so Norman enlisted a couple of his teenaged children to assist him, paying them a generous hourly rate for their work. He was encouraged by the results but grew impatient with the time it was taking my cousins to input the information — and so he recruited me, his college-age nephew, to join the team.
I was in my freshman year, taking a computer programming course (my advisor had counseled me that everyone who was anyone was going to need to know about computers in the future), and though I was perhaps the poorest student in the class, I suggested to Norman that the best student in the class, a computer genius I’d befriended, might be able to put together some sort of program to do the work we were now doing painstakingly by hand. Norman liked the idea enough to pay my friend $500 to develop something, and soon, buoyed by the results the computer produced, he moved from making “mind bets” to making real money bets, based on what the program was telling us.
All through the first couple of months of the summer of 1976, I would call up Norman’s bookie and tell him which teams and which pitchers the computer wanted us to bet. By the beginning of August, we were down well over $10,000.
When Norris got wind of Norman’s losses, she was furious. She decided to punish him by spending an amount equal to his baseball losses on remodeling the kitchen in the Provincetown house. Chastened, and $20,000 poorer, Norman threw in the towel, discontinuing the Great Baseball Biorhythms experiment.
True to form, whenever one of his theories didn’t pan out, he quickly came up with another theory to explain why. In this case, he concluded that biorhythms were not a reliable predictor of performance because major leaguers were professionals. “That means,” Norman told me, “that even on your worst day you’re able to do your job.”
I was too intimidated to tell him that his original premise, despite his reassessment, still made sense to me. Professionals do in fact have bad days. There is variation in performance. The question was, could that variation be predicted?
If he were still around today, I’d tell my uncle that the real flaw in our project wasn’t the idea that biorhythms might exist, it was the idea that two different people would have the same biorhythmic ups and downs simply because they were born on the same day. Of course, the truth is, he should already have known that — he and Norris shared a birthday, after all! As their divergent views of the biorhythm experiment illustrated, they were definitely not always in perfect sync.
Peter Alson