Of course this means Warhol

Andy and Norman, Together Again

by Christopher Arnott

If there’s a ‘60s icon heaven, I’m sure they’ll have a hell of a coffee table book collection. Norman Mailer died last week. It’s become my mission in this column to connect every known person, place and thing throughout history to Pittsburgh’s pasty pop art deity Andy Warhol. Mailer’s an easy one, and not just because of the handy celeb-unifying dance floor at Studio 54.

In fact, John Homans, in his online memorial for New York Magazine here has beaten me to it:

"It in fact, as an artist, Mailer's accomplishment has as much to do with that of Andy Warhol as with his fellow novelists, in the sense that a large part of his artwork was his existence in the world.

But where Warhol emptied his persona of any human agency, achieving a kind of shimmering weightlessness, Mailer always revealed the human mechanics that drove him. They were co-inventors of modern fame, two sides of a coin."

Go, Homan! Andy and Norman’s personalities were worlds apart—Pennsylvania vs. New Jersey, Factory vs. desk, mumbling effeminate fly-on-wall versus blustering brawler—but they both ruled cultural corners of New York, and they both hit their creative peaks during the ‘60s. Despite their differences, they both were so well suited to that era that you could easily imagine them co-starring in one of the biggest hit plays of that time, The Odd Couple:

Norman: There! I’ve thrown the plate of spaghetti against the wall!
What do you think of that?!
Andy: I like the lines and colors. Now could you smash the bottle of tomato sauce so the label sticks up there? Mmmmmm.

The real-life exchanges between the two were stranger than fiction. A blogger named Palladian, responding to a Mailer obit post at althouse.blogspot.com, writes:

Mailer always makes me think of this passage from Andy Warhol's POPism:

"One Monday afternoon at the Factory, [Mark Lancaster] told me that Mailer had walked over to him at a party over the weekend and punched him in the gut.

I was impressed. "Norman Mailer actually punched you?" I said. "How great.

Why?"

"That's what I asked him. He said it was for wearing a pink jacket."

Norman Mailer was one of the few intellectuals that I really enjoyed."

We may in fact have Warhol to blame for such outlandish self-aggrandizing Mailer films as Maidstone. That act of cinematic abuse not only followed Warhol’s anyone-can-act ethic, it was made in the wake of Valerie Solanas’ attempt on Warhol’s life, not to mention the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and is those kneejerk artworks about inhumanity and its discontents.

The invaluable website www.warholstars.com features this Mailer commentary on Warhol’s kitchen-sink drama Kitchen, as related in George Plimpton’s oral history Edie:

Norman Mailer: "I think Warhol's films are historical documents. One hundred years from now they will look at Kitchen and see that incredibly cramped little set, which was indeed a kitchen; maybe it was eight feet wide, maybe it was six feet wide. It was photographed from a middle distance in a long, low medium shot, so it looked even narrower than that. You can see nothing but the kitchen table, the refrigerator, the stove, and the actors. The refrigerator hummed and droned on the sound track. Edie had the sniffles. She had a dreadful cold. She had one of those colds you get spending the long winter in a cold-water flat. The dialogue was dull and bounced off the enamel and plastic surfaces. It was a horror to watch. It captured the essence of every boring, dead day one's ever had in a city, a time when everything is imbued with the odor of damp washcloths and old drains. I suspect that a hundred years from now people will look at Kitchen and say, 'Yes, that is the way it was in the late Fifties, early Sixties in America. That's why they had the war in Vietnam. That's why the rivers were getting polluted. That's why there was typological glut. That's why the horror came down. That's why the plague was on its way.' Kitchen shows that better than any other work of that time."

Troy Patterson, at www.normanmailersociety.org, mentions these two kindred cinematic spirits in the same breath, as a way to explain a (vastly superior, I’d say) third:

What's your take on Cassavetes? Here's mine: The filmmaker is one of three avant-gardists who readied America for reality television and the cult of pop personality, and his highly wrought psychodramas are an essential template for every loosely scripted, boozily delivered Real World screaming match. You will surely agree that one of his co-forefathers is Andy Warhol, whose Screen Tests made one giant leap for voyeurism and whose Sleep perfected the art of nothing happening. Do you need convincing that the other is Norman Mailer?

The grandest connection, however, is when Mailer wrote his own self- mocking obituary, in 1979 at the request of Boston Magazine (dug up and posted here), he quoted Warhol in it:

“I always thought Norman kept a low profile. That’s what I liked about him so much.”