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.)
Whatever prompted him, Mailer built the second half of the book around Schiller and his assorted machinations and manipulations. Larry was all for it, though less out of self-aggrandizement than self-protection: laying bare how he operated would protect both men from charges that Mailer had whitewashed him. Besides, when he was eliciting the most intimate thoughts from everyone he was interviewing, he couldn’t very well hold back himself—he, too, owed it to history. When Mailer asked him whether he could handle the inevitable blowback, Schiller assured him he could.
So, in a series of interviews, Schiller laid out his life story for Mailer, in exacting and often excruciating detail. “He just gave me more material than anyone had ever given me,” Mailer recalled. “If he had diarrhea he let me know about it, if he threw up in emotional agitation, he let me know about, he didn’t protect himself.” And, as was his wont, Larry embroidered freely along the way.
He described how, as a 16-year-old on a photographic internship in New York in the summer of 1953 (this much was true), he’d captured Julius Rosenberg’s mother weeping at the moment of her son’s electrocution, and how that picture flashed around the world. (He hadn’t, and it didn’t.) And how that coup brought assignments to the Helsinki Olympics (they’d taken place the previous year) and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth (which had occurred two weeks before the executions). And, yet again, how he’d covered Hemingway’s funeral. (He didn’t.) Into the book all this promptly went, no questions asked; as Mailer had confessed to Mike Wallace, investigating had never been his thing.
But there was another, more egregious bit of revisionism, concerning Schiller’s dealings with Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of the New York Post. Looking to make his first American splash in the climactic moments of the Gilmore saga, Murdoch had offered him $125,000 for Gilmore’s dying words, but Schiller told Mailer that, tempted as he was, he had turned Murdoch down, though only after a brutal, two-fronted war, with both his conscience and his bowels, in his motel room in Utah. “No way was I ever gonna sell Gary Gilmore’s death,” he told Mailer. “I’ve got to stay by what my gut tells me, and what I really believe.” So moved was Schiller by his own principled stand that his voice broke as he related it. Murdoch, on the line from Australia, was a perfect gentleman about his decision, Schiller said.
By spurning Murdoch’s money, the novelist and short story writer John Cheever said in his review of The Executioner’s Song, Schiller “contributes a sense of decency and fitness” that “gives this squalid narrative the commanding heft of a tragedy.”
But there was hell to pay at home with his image-conscious new wife, Steffie. “Sure enough, she comes into the kitchen and she’s just screaming and screaming and screaming at me: ‘Why do you have to talk about sitting on the toilet and having diarrhea?’” he says she shouted. “‘Don’t you have any dignity or respect?’” But Schiller stood firm. “To me it wasn’t humiliation, it was life, and character development, and telling a story,” he says. “I knew she’d be upset, but at that time, I guess, certain things were more important than my marriage. So I’m screaming back at her, ‘This book is more important than our image! This is a great work! And we’re part of it!’”
In one of his periodic and surprising bursts of candor, he once conceded his version of events was something Mailer maybe should have mulled. “I can say that Schiller has been emancipated, Schiller makes the moral decision,” Schiller told Peter Manso in 1983. “But Mailer has to decide whether I really believe in what I’m saying or whether I’m saying it just for his book.”
It was, Schiller now admits, “the single greatest untruth” in The Executioner’s Song, one prompted by guilt and insecurity and embarrassment over what he’d actually done: duck into a phone booth moments after Gilmore had been dispatched to give Murdoch his headline: “Let’s do it.”
No one was more attuned to Schiller’s fibs than Mailer; he’d told Liz Smith once that “when it comes to lying, Larry Schiller makes Baron von Munchausen look like George Washington!” Elsewhere in The Executioner’s Song, he’d even alluded to Schiller’s proclivities. “There wasn’t a disclosure he had gotten in his twenty years of media,” he wrote of Schiller, “that hadn’t been built on some part of Bullshit Mountain.” But here, too, Mailer wasn’t one for investigating. “Okay, that’s good. I want to add that” was all he said when Schiller finished his counter-narrative. Mailer printed Larry’s legend, and it became fact.
Despite his love for Mailer, Schiller never did come clean with him. And 20 years later, when I interviewed him for Vanity Fair, he told the same fib to me. In my case, he eventually confessed, though more, it seemed, out of playfulness than contrition or embarrassment; he liked being a rascal. I wasn’t angry with him then or now, because that’s what he’d always done; he wouldn’t have survived any other way.
“Watch Out, All Historians”
Schiller was unhappy with Mailer’s original draft, which, despite what he called “seeds of greatness,” he considered “totally unpublishable,” largely because Mailer had written a love story rather than a book about crime and punishment. When Schiller insisted he re-write it, Mailer pleaded poverty; that would take him three months, he said, and he didn’t have the dough. Schiller convinced Howard Kaminsky at Crown to give Mailer an additional $100,000, but it came with conditions: fearing Mailer’s bum heart would give out before the book was finished, Kaminsky demanded he take out some life insurance, and insisted the existing draft be prepared for publication. This Schiller arranged, hiring an editor behind Mailer’s back. He squirreled the edited draft away in a safe; only when Mailer’s revised version was accepted did he shred the substitute.
Fueled by Didion’s rave in The New York Times Book Review, The Executioner’s Song spent six months on the paper’s best-seller list. “Mailer has hit that home run of a book he promised us twenty years ago,” declared Larry McMurtry. Mindful of what rivals like Tom Wolfe and William Styron were collecting for film rights to their books, Mailer expected a million-dollar sale, and when that didn’t happen—Gilmore, after all, was hardly a Hollywood-type hero—he had a scapegoat readily at hand. “If you weren’t attached to it, they’d buy it,” Mailer told Schiller.
The film, which Schiller directed, went to TV instead, with Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore and Rosanna Arquette as Nicole. Schiller had Mailer write the screenplay, paying him $250,000 for it—twice as much, he says, as anyone else would have. But when Mailer hectored him during the filming, Schiller, now a director, kicked him off the set.
It was while Schiller was shooting another film, a biopic on Marilyn Monroe, that the Pulitzer Prizes for 1980 were announced. Partly at Schiller’s insistence, the book had been nominated under fiction; the competition for nonfiction that year seemed too stiff. Mailer readily agreed: the designation enhanced the book’s prospects while excusing any inaccuracies. Calling it fiction was itself fiction; the vast bulk of the book was true. But it did the trick.
“Prizes are like beautiful women and the Pulitzer Prize is more attractive than most,” Mailer told one reporter the day of the announcement. Neither then nor in other interviews did he mention Schiller, and that bothered Schiller’s wife. “Steffie was really crying and emotional and everything,” Schiller recalled. “You know, ‘All the time you put in, Larry, and now the book’s getting the award, he won’t even recognize you.’” Schiller had to agree. “When it came to the glory he completely forgot about me,” he said. Along with the good things about Mailer, he told Steffie, “you have to accept the hurts.”
Mailer didn’t invite Schiller and his wife to any awards banquet, nor even for a celebratory dinner on their own. “I accept Norman for what he is, I’m not gonna change him,” Schiller told Manso. When the film was nominated for five Emmys, including for best screenplay, he invited Mailer to the ceremony, though he can’t remember whether he came. “Some people keep scorecards,” Schiller said. “I don’t.”
The success of The Executioner’s Song, along with a key assist from Roy Cohn, a close friend of Random House’s owner Si Newhouse, propelled Mailer into a $4 million contract for his next four books; for a time, the company doled out Mailer’s advance in $30,000-a-month installments; it was, says Schiller, the “deal that kept Norman alive.”
The two emerged from the Gilmore experience as friends, Schiller says. Mailer didn’t go quite so far, later saying they were still only “two-thirds of the way” there. He was being generous. When Manso prepared to interview Schiller for the oral history he was doing, Mailer offered him two words of advice: “Watch out.” (Instead, Manso found Schiller forthcoming, keen, dispassionate, and granular, describing his ups and downs with Mailer in almost painterly detail.)
By prior agreement, Mailer could see everything everyone told Manso about him and excise whatever he wished. Mailer’s retorts, written in the margins of 2,000-page drafts, were generally “petulant and self-protective,” Manso later wrote, but “his greatest scorn was reserved for Lawrence Schiller.” So exercised was he by what Schiller said, in fact, that in writing out his comments, “he’d actually gouged through the paper several times with his soft No. 2 Ticonderoga.”
Comments such as “Pure lying,” or “All horseshit,” or “God, what a maniac,” or “Inaccuracy should not be rewarded,” or “I’m not going to be lied about and pissed on by liars,” or “Larry should carry a sign saying, ‘Watch out, all historians,” or “Every time Schiller makes a self-serving statement, you can count on it: 5 to 1, it’s false” filled the pages. Even the rare bits of praise came laced with vitriol. “The interviews [on Gilmore] he did were often wonderful,” Mailer conceded, “but they bore the same relation to the finished product that maybe sap does to maple syrup.”
But over the next decade or so, with no further projects to fight over, tensions between them finally eased. “Norman had mellowed as time had gone on, just as I had,” Schiller recalled. “We both gained weight, we both had heart conditions, we both lived on pills.” As he came of age in the 1980s, Mailer’s son, John Buffalo, recalls, Schiller was often around, and his visits were always a big deal. “There were very few people that Norman wanted to impress, but Larry was one of them,” he says. “I think he enjoyed his company, but I think the excitement was also that Larry would bring big things to the table.” By the early 1990s, Mailer was calling Schiller one of his closest friends. It was then that Schiller cooked up their last great collaboration.
“The American Tolstoy”
Using connections with Soviet intelligence he’d developed directing a mini-series in Russia on Peter the Great (the project, he says, had been green-lighted by Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, whom he’d visited at a dacha outside Moscow), Schiller gained access to heretofore secret K.G.B. files on Lee Harvey Oswald, who’d lived in Belarus from 1960 to 1962. Schiller’s association with the Kennedy story dated back to when he photographed Oswald the day of JFK’s assassination.
In 1993, he and Mailer spent nine months in grim post-Soviet Minsk, retracing Oswald’s steps and plying former K.G.B. agents and friends of Lee and Marina with cash, black-market food, and truckloads of fancy shoes to dish. This time around, Schiller repackaged Mailer as “the American Tolstoy,” an elderly eminence with a bum heart risking his life in their godforsaken country to write his last great book, this one on a vital chapter of Soviet and American history.
The two did most of their interviews jointly, and given their very different approaches—Schiller said he went with Vaseline while Mailer favored the sledgehammer—additional skirmishes between them inevitably ensued, sometimes in front of astonished interviewees. “The woman’s looking on in absolute horror,” Mailer recalled of a session with an elderly schoolteacher who’d known the Oswalds. “This is the way he talks to the American Tolstoy? And this is the way the American Tolstoy speaks back?”
Tensions between the two peaked when Schiller insisted on smuggling out copies of Oswald’s files (procured by slipping $10,000 to the top K.G.B. man in Minsk) rather than rely on their notes. For all his famed machismo, Mailer was petrified: surely, he warned, they’d be arrested at the border and land in the gulag. Or at least Schiller would, and Mailer foresaw wasting his twilight years trying to get him sprung. “You’re out of your fucking skull,” Mailer told him; it was only for a book, and the book was plenty good enough already.
“Norman always loved that covert work, that sense of pushing the boundaries of what’s safe and what’s not, and then there’s Larry, who will go even further,” says Buffalo. “When Norman Mailer is the one urging restraint and caution, it gives you a sense for who you’re dealing with on the other side.”
For Schiller, the documents were essential: by buttressing the book’s credibility, he was also fortifying his own, something Mailer didn’t need and couldn’t understand. “He didn’t give a fuck,” Schiller later told Mailer’s biographer, J. Michael Lennon. “I can respect him for that, but we’re playing with a subject that is bigger than Norman Mailer. We’re playing with history.” For 45 minutes one afternoon, he and Schiller went at one another, and before long, two fat guys were hurling one another down a dismal stairwell in Minsk.
They got out of the country with their documents (and with the authorities surely looking the other way), and by the time the two interviewed Marina Oswald in Dallas, they were a well-oiled machine—too well oiled, as far as Marina was concerned. “First they gained her trust,” an aide to her later charged, “then they isolated her from her home. Then they met with her separately, sort of a ‘good cop-bad cop’ approach until she confided in them her oldest and deepest secrets. They are both despicable.” (“Tolstoy he’s not,” Marina later said of Mailer.)
When the resulting book, Oswald’s Tale, was excerpted in The New Yorker, and Mailer acknowledged Schiller as his collaborator, the fisticuffs were forgotten. “It was a very emotional moment for me,” Schiller recalls, choking up as he did. “I never in my life dreamed that I would ever be Norman Mailer’s ‘collaborator.’”
“I Was God and You Were the Devil”
Within hours of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Schiller was back in the center of things, advising Robert Kardashian, his former neighbor in Bel Air, through whom he’d met O. J. Simpson, on how he and his infamous pal should handle the police and press. Determined that their conversation not be surveilled or overheard by the Los Angeles Police Department, he directed Kardashian to meet him under the noisy intersection of Interstate 405 and Mulholland Drive.
Mailer steered clear of the story. “I just thought, it’s just so ugly,” he told Larry Grobel. “It’s bad for blondes, it’s bad for Blacks.” But by convincing Schiller to take his name off I Want to Tell You, Simpson’s self-serving collection of prison meditations that Schiller had assembled in strict secrecy out of their conversations in the county jail, he did Schiller a great favor. “Norman didn’t only help me; he saved my fuckin’ ass,” Schiller says.
Pre-trial, says Schiller, the agent Andrew Wylie told him that a publisher was willing to pay Mailer and him $10 million for their account of the case. Still, Mailer demurred: he had other things to write, he said, and besides, it was high time Schiller did a book on his own. “Five thousand words and a thesaurus, Larry, and you can write,” Mailer assured him. “He walked away from half of $10 million,” Schiller tells me, choking up again. “That said a lot about what Norman thought of me.”
As Schiller proceeded with his book, Mailer cheered him on, and taught him the rudiments of narrative writing. He showed him how, by moving things around a bit and adding a few words, an interview could be turned into prose. He bought him some books by Georges Simenon, then read them aloud to him, to show him how simple good storytelling could be. He brought in an editor to improve Schiller’s primitive grammar. And he stayed on him. “I remember Norman keeping pounding into my head, ‘Average 1,500 words a day. Go to work, just like you’re going to a factory,’” Schiller recalled.
When the book, American Tragedy, was complete, Mailer blurbed it. (“My old friend and colleague has come up with a book that is impossible to put down,” he wrote. “I haven’t turned pages this quickly in years.”) He also co-hosted (with Dominick Dunne) the book party at Elaine’s. American Tragedy became a best-seller, but even Schiller concedes it would have been much better had Mailer written it.
The screenplay the two wrote for Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story, a made-for-television movie from 2002 on the life of the turncoat F.B.I. agent, turned out to be their last joint venture. It was then that Schiller thanked Mailer in the way he wanted. “I told him how he gave me another life, how he matured me, how I no longer felt I had to prove myself every second of my life,” he recalls. “I told him he gave me the confidence to be somebody. And how he made me a better person, and how that was the greatest gift one person could ever give someone else.” Mailer, he says, sloughed it all off; tough guys, it turns out, don’t take praise any better than they dance.
Despite living on different coasts, Schiller and Mailer remained constants in one another’s lives. As Mailer’s heart problems worsened, Schiller visited him often. He urged him to seek treatment and chewed him out when, fearing surgery would impair his memory, Mailer refused to get it. “I screamed at him once, ‘How can you do this to yourself?,’” Schiller recalls. “I didn’t have the right to talk to him that way, but I did.”
“You know, I’m not gonna be here by the end of the year, Larry,” Mailer warned him in the spring of 2007. “You better figure out what’s going to happen to my house and my legacy.” Shortly after that, Mailer was hospitalized. In the I.C.U. for a spell, he joked with a nurse that whatever normal visiting hours were, Schiller would get around them. Schiller went over with Mailer the various business-related matters Mailer’s sixth wife, Norris, ill with cancer herself, had asked him to tend to, making sure Mailer approved. And though by now Mailer could talk only in a whisper, he managed to say that if Schiller wasn’t doing such things, who else would?
Schiller was at Mailer’s bedside in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in October 2007 when, two days after lung surgery, Mailer came to. “‘Larry, I had a dream about you,’” he managed to announce, in spite of all the tubes coming out of his mouth. “‘I was God and you were the Devil. And we’ve made a pact together. We’re gonna fight technology. It’s our last stand, Larry—against technology!’” The dehumanizing effects of modernity and machines had long obsessed Mailer, and now, at least in his subconscious, here was Schiller, fighting them alongside him.
Determined in Mailer’s final days not to crowd his children—with Mailer having kept Schiller largely cordoned off from them, most barely knew him—Schiller steered clear of Mailer’s room, confining himself to the cafeteria instead.
On the morning of November 10, 2007, Mailer died. “I sat looking at the computer, unable to press the button,” Schiller says of the obituary he had prepared. “Maybe he had sunk into a deep coma; maybe a miracle would happen. Then I called Norris and said, ‘Should I send it?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I felt the full weight of the responsibility in telling the world that the man I loved so much had died. Still weeping, I pressed the button.”
Over the next couple of days, he helped Norris plan for the funeral. At Frank E. Campbell’s, the fancy chapel on Madison Avenue, he helped her pick out a mahogany casket. Later, he photographed the interior of the Provincetown house for posterity, picked the pictures to display at the funeral home, rented a canopy for the gravesite in case it rained, and positioned the press the day of the interment far enough away not to intrude but close enough to capture the scene. “He really coordinated everything—all of the things that go into the passing of a 20th-century icon that one doesn’t necessarily think of,” Buffalo says. “I’m not sure what we would have done without him.”
Almost single-handedly, Schiller turned Mailer’s Provincetown house into a writers’ colony, raising more than $2 million (a quarter of that coming out of his own pocket), then convincing Günter Grass, Tina Brown, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, among others, to serve on a board of advisers. It all came back to Otto Preminger’s advice to him years earlier to surround yourself with people smarter than you. The place lasted only six years, until the Mailer children sold the house, but in that time, a parade of distinguished figures—including Don DeLillo, Walter Mosley, Gay Talese, Billy Collins, Tom Wolfe, Elie Wiesel, and Maya Angelou—either worked with students at the center or spoke at its annual galas in New York.
Schiller helped plan a memorial for Mailer at Carnegie Hall and spoke there, too. He found new outlets for Mailer’s work, including three coffee-table books in which lavish photographs complemented his words. Some were autographed by Mailer himself, but only because Schiller had thought to have him sign a thousand sheets of paper for posthumous insertion into the binding. He helped arrange the publication of a book of Mailer’s letters and convince Random House to write off the $3.5 million in unearned advances Mailer owed the publisher. He consulted on the $2.5 million sale of Mailer’s papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. To introduce Mailer to younger readers, he established, with the National Council of Teachers of English, a program of cash awards in Mailer’s name for promising high school and college students. He also got Norris a screenwriting job, thereby qualifying her for the health insurance offered by the Screenwriters Guild until her death, in 2010.
Schiller never did read much of Mailer’s work. But in championing him, a project that continues to this day, he’s honored him much more significantly. And maybe made up for that Nobel Prize which—but for that cover of Time, the one with Marilyn Monroe tousling his hair—Mailer might have won, if only in Schiller’s own fertile and fevered mind.
David Margolick, a longtime reporter for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, is the author of several books, most recently When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy. He is currently completing a biography of Jonas Salk
