The life of Gary Gilmore, the drifter and double murderer whose impending execution had brought Larry Schiller and Norman Mailer back together after their rocky beginnings, this time to godforsaken Utah, was in its final act. And when he wrote up the story, Mailer would place Larry center stage.
With Gilmore and his girlfriend, Nicole Baker, in their respective institutions (she in what Larry still calls, after Gilmore, “the nuthouse”), Mailer needed someone else to hold the story together. It was a role he had given himself in several previous books but not in this one; according to Schiller, Joan Didion had chastised him for it over lunch at the Polo Lounge after reading an early draft of the book. “When are you going to grow up, Norman, and let the story speak for itself?” he said he’d heard her ask. (Mailer’s official biographer, J. Michael Lennon, doubts this happened; Mailer later insisted he and Didion were never close.)
