James Campbell, remembrance
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 14; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 14.
Norman Mailer came to the bar of the Algonquin Hotel, West 44th Street, on May 25, 1988, to talk about James Baldwin. I had requested an interview for the biography I was researching (published in 1991 as Talking at the Gates). Baldwin had died the previous year. He and Mailer had been friends, occasionally adversaries, through the 1950s and into the 60s, when the friendship faded. Mailer criticized Baldwin for living in Europe — France, mainly, but also Turkey — when there was so much to do at home.
Mailer asked me to be at the Algonquin at 6. He would be meeting his daughter later at Lincoln Center, to see David Mamet’s play Speed-the-Plow, with Madonna as the female lead. He arrived on time, to find me in the foyer. The bar was busy with a pre-theater, after-work crowd. We were seated at a table in the center. The waiter took our order: a gin and bitters for Mailer; I probably asked for a beer. I fumbled with my cassette recorder. The drinks came; Mailer toyed with his; the small talk faltered.
“This is all wrong,” he said. Something about the drink didn’t please him — too much ice or too little, the wrong mixer. It was noisy. We could hardly hear ourselves. What was it going to be like with a recording?
The waiter was summoned. With deliberation, the drinks order was repeated. Another table was requested and found. Small talk resumed, and then Mailer spoke about Baldwin with fondness and good humor, always with honesty.
For reasons obscure, I didn’t make extensive use of the interview in the book, but when preparing a new edition for publication recently, I unearthed the tape, transcribed it and included the conversation as an appendix.
Since then, I’ve become much more particular about my drinks. The first of the evening is invariably a Screwdriver — vodka and freshly squeezed orange juice, eight parts to one. Wrong vodka? Too little ice? Juice from a carton? “This is all wrong.”
James Campbell