A few months after the “Rumble in the Jungle”—Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman in Zaire on October 30, 1974—Neil Leifer, who’d photographed the bout for Sports Illustrated, had a memorable encounter with Norman Mailer. It came at a party the writer George Plimpton held at his New York home for those who’d covered the fight.
Leifer spotted Mailer that night standing by the pool table. He was pleased to see him; after all, they’d soon be collaborating on a book of photographs of Ali that Leifer’s pal Lawrence Schiller was putting together, one promising to do for the heavyweight champion what Schiller and Mailer had done the year before in their fabulously successful book about Marilyn Monroe. How thrilled he was, Leifer told Mailer, to be a part of his new book with Larry Schiller!
“What book with Larry Schiller?,” Mailer snapped. “I wouldn’t do another book with that [expletive] if he was the last person on earth!” Leifer can’t remember the precise term Mailer used for Larry, but it was something on the order of “cocksucker” or “prick.” And if Leifer is fuzzy on exactly what Mailer said that night, he’s quite clear on how Mailer looked: a vein was practically popping out of his forehead.
Leifer was shocked to learn Mailer wasn’t on the project. He was also shocked by the vehemence with which Mailer said so. And he was shocked to hear Schiller described so contemptuously. Good old amiable Larry Schiller? Larry the eternal go-getter, with his roly-poly charm and goofy grin? Larry the inveterate tinkerer, always affixing his cameras to places—the fuselages of airplanes, the guts of an experimental navy diving bell, the side of the car in which Tippi Hedren was ferrying around Alfred Hitchcock—they’d never gone before? When Leifer had wanted to tuck a camera into second base at Dodger Stadium, it was Schiller who’d lent him his Leica, even though it ended up dented by Willie Davis’s spikes. How could anyone hate him?
A few years after Plimpton’s soirée, Leifer was floored once more when he learned that Mailer was working on another book with Schiller, this one about Gary Gilmore, the drifter who’d just been executed for killing two young men in Utah. What, he wondered, could possibly explain Mailer’s about-face? He was dying to know. He got his chance one day at Gallagher’s, the New York steak house, when he spotted Mailer at the bar.
“Norman, you lambasted that bastard,” Leifer remembers telling Mailer. “You told me, ‘Neil, that’s the last guy on earth I would ever do another fucking book with,’ that he was the worst person on the planet. How the hell did that happen?
“And Mailer reaches down and picks up this black alligator-skin Gucci attaché case,” Leifer recalls. “And he says, ‘What do you think of this, Neil?’ And I say, ‘What does this have to do with anything?’ He says, ‘Well, Larry gave it to me.’ ‘So?’ ‘Well, he gave it to me when he approached me about doing the Gilmore book with him, and he said, “Open it up, Norman.” And I opened it up and there was a piece of paper in it. It was a bank check for a million bucks.’”
“I quickly decided I would work with Larry on the book,” said Mailer, a man with seven children (and another on the way), five ex-wives (and another marriage in the works), plus a gambling problem, plus taxes in arrears, plus foreclosure proceedings on his house, plus an unfinished novel set (or mired) in ancient Egypt.
Schiller, who’d suffered from a lifelong undiagnosed case of dyslexia, couldn’t really read newspapers. But he could scan the headlines, and in 1976, while co-producing a film about the trial that Lee Harvey Oswald might have gotten, he’d spotted something in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner about a man in Utah who, condemned to die for two murders, had persuaded his girlfriend, the mother of two young children, to kill herself with him. Though their twin suicide had failed, the question remained: How could one human being have such power over another? It seemed like something worth investigating.
Schiller, like Mailer, had hit a professional brick wall—his own marriage over, photography no longer satisfying him, and nothing more fulfilling in the offing—and was up for an adventure. Beyond the Bonneville Salt Flats, where he’d photographed drivers chasing land-speed records, he knew nothing about Utah, nor anyone connected with the Gilmore case, nor about Mormonism, which was central to it.
But with his customary mix of chutzpah, charm, and cash (ABC had given him $75,000 in seed money), he’d parachuted into the place, then out-hustled smoother, more credentialed types such as the singer Paul Anka and the television producer David Susskind to lock up the key players in the case, beginning with Gilmore himself. “I was the Fuller Brush man. I was the Avon salesman,” Schiller says.
As always, his competitors had underestimated, even ridiculed him. “I don’t want to brag, but the difference between Susskind and Schiller is like the gap between the Dallas Cowboys and a high school football team,” Susskind, who’d produced A Raisin in the Sun and Requiem for a Heavyweight, among other landmark movies, told Gilmore’s lawyers. Exactly right, conceded Schiller, whose last film had been the less than immortal Hey, I’m Alive! But as he told those lawyers and anyone else who’d listen, while Susskind and his “Cowboys” were in some fucking office building in New York, he was already in Utah, suited up, on the gridiron, ready to play.
“Let’s Do It”
Settling in for the long haul, he’d taken up—actually, nearly taken over—the Travelodge in Orem, Utah, not far from where the murders took place, filling a suite of rooms with typists, researchers, security men, and heavy equipment, including state-of-the-art copiers. He’d put a Xerox repairman on retainer for after-hours emergencies. He’d installed dedicated phone lines to keep snooping motel operators from listening in and selling off what they’d overheard to others on the story. He soon had not only exclusive access to Gilmore but also—for yet more money—the letters Gilmore had written to his girlfriend from prison.
Even Gilmore chafed over Schiller’s hegemony. “That son of a bitch acts like he owns me,” he complained to his brother.
Schiller had no illusions about Gilmore. “He could stick a knife right into your armpit and up into your heart with a fucking smile,” he says. But he needed to stay in his good graces, both to keep him talking and to secure the precious spot Gilmore had promised him in the death house when the end came. The condemned man had only five such slots to hand out, and with family and friends to take care of, that left only one for a journalist. Or a “journalist,” as Schiller’s rivals and detractors liked to call him.
Christmas 1976, which fell two weeks before Gilmore’s scheduled execution, proved especially tricky. What do you give, or even say, to someone about to face a firing squad? Schiller settled on recycling that line about Hemingway’s final adventure he’d supposedly given Paris Match after supposedly covering his funeral, neither of which he’d done. “EACH MINUTE BRINGS US CLOSER TOGETHER AND I KNOW THAT WE WERE RIGHT TO EMBARK ON THIS CHALLENGE STOP,” the telegram read. “I AM THOROUGHLY CONVINCED THAT AS I GO DEEPER THE MEANING OF YOUR LIFE BECOMES MORE CLEAR STOP IT IS AN ADVENTURE FOR ME AND THAT ADVENTURE CAN NEVER BE REPAID UNTIL I COME UPON THE GREATEST ADVENTURE STOP.” It was gibberish, but with its patina of solicitude, profundity, and mystery, it succeeded: when the marksmen behind the curtain did their work, Schiller would be there to watch.
“All week long, the loathing of Larry Schiller has been growing,” Robert Sam Anson, of New Times, later wrote. “He has become an obsession for us.” But they kept their feelings to themselves because they needed Schiller too much: he had the goods, morsels of which he’d periodically sprinkle around to anyone doing him a favor. Taking it all in from far-off Provincetown, Mailer marveled at how, despite his wheeling and dealing, Schiller remained relatively unscathed by the whole sordid spectacle. “With the kind of guy Schiller is,” Mailer mused, “you’d think they’d be attacking the shit out of him.”
But Schiller took certain precautions. While speaking to Bill Moyers, he insisted he be positioned either behind the wheel of his car (to hide his belly) or surrounded by typewriters (to look like a real newsman). When Jimmy Breslin sashayed into town on Execution Eve, on assignment for the Daily News, he knew enough to stay not in some fancy place in Salt Lake but at the Orem Travelodge, in the room next to Larry’s. “Some people say this is an absolutely disgusting thing to do, to make money off a guy being executed,” he wrote of Schiller. “I couldn’t agree more. But I didn’t discuss this with him yesterday. I was too busy bargaining with him to see if I could be a witness to the execution and get a good raise for being there.” It didn’t work. “I can’t let you have my seat,” Larry told him. “Gary wouldn’t understand.” It was from that seat that Schiller got to hear Gilmore’s last three words: “Let’s do it.” And they did.
A few days later, when Gilmore’s ashes, stuffed into a plastic bread bag, were scattered over the desolate hills of Utah, Schiller was—surprise, surprise—aboard the plane.
Next came the posthumous publication in Playboy of Gilmore’s jailhouse interview, cobbled together from the questions Schiller had spoon-fed Gilmore’s lawyers. Hugh Hefner paid Larry $35,000 for it—more, says Schiller, than he’d forked over for any prior interview. Schiller promptly sent it to Mailer, who told him it was “the best single interview of its sort I’ve ever read.” (“And since I wasn’t fond of Larry Schiller in those days, be certain it was said with grudging respect,” he added later.) The question now facing Schiller was whether Mailer would write the Gilmore book for him.
Schiller has often said his first choice for the job wasn’t Mailer at all but Joan Didion, the foremost student of the American West. But he later told Mailer he’d never considered anyone but him. From the outset, he’d put Barry Farrell, the journalist he’d hired to help him report the story, on notice that, were there to be a book, he’d ask Mailer to write it. Fearful that Mailer was still peeved over Marilyn, the illustrated biography of Monroe which had prompted bitter disputes between him and Mailer, he’d not done so right away, and Mailer admired him for it. “I respected your acumen in not calling me at that time,” he told Schiller shortly after signing on. “I would have said, ‘No. I don’t want to get into this fucker.’”
Looking back, Mailer was really the inevitable choice. To Schiller, he had the credentials: having stabbed one of his wives, Mailer was acquainted with, and intrigued by, violence. While some in Mailer’s circle thought the Gilmore story a tabloid tale unworthy of him, Schiller knew Mailer wouldn’t. He also knew that Mailer was broke. “Norman needs this book as much as I need him,” Schiller told Farrell. He knew, too, that Mailer would fall for Nicole Baker, Gilmore’s young, winsome, and sexy girlfriend.
So, to seal the deal, he flew Baker to New York, where she dined with Mailer and Schiller at Trader Vic’s (and where Mailer taught her how to play chess). Then they all skated together in Central Park. “You’re right,” Mailer told Schiller afterward. “There’s a book here.” Larry promptly sold the paperback rights to the book to Howard Kaminsky of Crown for $500,000, a sum even Mailer’s longtime agent, Scott Meredith, said Mailer could no longer command and would never get. Little, Brown, to whom Mailer owed a book, was essentially given hardcover rights for $25,000.
But, above all, Schiller wanted to work with Mailer again; Mailer still represented his surest route to self-respect and respectability. For his part, Mailer thought he saw a new and improved Larry Schiller, more thoughtful and mature than before, and, with the beard he now sported, “more handsome,” Mailer told him. He also realized that Schiller had dumped into his lap a chance to write that “immense panoramic novel,” the “collective novel of America” that people had been expecting him to write ever since The Naked and the Dead.
The advance wasn’t all payable at once, and Schiller was entitled to half. But he could wait. Flush with cash (from selling some art for 10 times what he’d just paid for it), he drew up a banker’s check for the full amount, placed it in a briefcase (not an attaché case) made of ordinary leather (not alligator skin) from Tumi (not Gucci), and gave it to Mailer.
“10 Million Facts”
By that point, Schiller had already interviewed practically everyone who’d been a part of Gilmore’s life. It was, as he put it, like jumping into a well without a bottom. Ignorant of the rules of conventional journalism, he’d devised his own. He’d dress as his subjects dressed, so as not to seem too hoity-toity. Then, though there’d be a chair or couch nearby, he’d take his customary place, on the floor; it “disguarded” and “unarmed” people, he found. Unlike a reporter on deadline, all he had was time, or so he’d make it seem; he’d meander, asking people about their parents or grandparents, or what color cars they drove, or whether they wore pajamas to bed, or when they’d first fought with their spouses, or their earliest memory of death. By the time he got around to Gary Gilmore, they’d have dropped their guard. “It comes out of my insecurity as a journalist,” he says. “I don’t think I’m smart enough to walk in like a Mike Wallace.”
He’d make a great show of transparency with his subjects, acknowledging his own financial stake in the story. He’d enhance—or, as he puts it, “adapt”—his own biography if it helped. With more recalcitrant sources, he’d resort to what Mailer called his “Mammy routine,” prostrating himself before them, reminding them of their own importance, telling them they owed it to history to spill. Sometimes he’d unconsciously mirror his subjects, taking on local idioms and mannerisms; it drove his fiancée, Stephanie Wolf, batty when he’d come back to Los Angeles suddenly sounding and acting like some roughneck from Provo.
All his heavy lifting would impress Mailer, he hoped, but also guide and inspire him. Publishers rightly feared that Mailer would turn in another extended essay or, worse, a sloppy, derivative, self-indulgent pastiche like Marilyn. By overwhelming Mailer with good material, Schiller figured, he could force him into doing his best work. “If I gave Mailer 10 million facts, he’d be smart enough to see the worth of the facts and not rely on his bravado,” Schiller says. Done properly, here was a book that could redeem them both.
All told, Schiller gave Mailer either 16,000 or 24,000 pages of interviews (his own estimates vary) with Baker and her family, Gilmore’s uncle and mother, Gilmore’s various wardens and cellmates, and many others. “I was, like, aghast,” Mailer remembered, “because the material was so rich and so deep and so full of a kind of American life that I knew only in passing from the Army, but didn’t really know, and there it was.”
Mailer was a lousy interviewer. “He was too full of himself,” according to his biographer, J. Michael Lennon. But suddenly here was the untutored Schiller, teaching him how, and he marveled at Larry’s technique. “These people had never been interviewed before, and they were having this incredible experience of talking about themselves, and having someone truly interested, or so it seemed, in everything they had to say,” Mailer said. “And so they went on and on and on, and by the time Larry got to Gilmore they were wide open … He had, in effect, aerated their memory, so a dim or imprecise recollection of Gilmore had shifted instead to this heads-on, focused, sharp set of memories.”
“After that, I had considerable respect for him,” Mailer went on. “He was one of the few people in the world that I did respect, because I began to realize that for a man who was always sheepish about his lack of a real higher education, his lack of intellectuality at the highest level, his lack of various kinds of intellectual finesse, that despite all that, despite the fact that he did not have an elevated mind, he had an elevated set of instincts when it came to capturing the life of other people.”
For the first of Mailer’s several trips to Utah, Schiller set up the interviews, then cleared out. “I didn’t want to insult him and have people think that I was his chaperone,” he said. On subsequent trips, the pair—“two fat little detectives,” in Mailer’s description—interviewed people together. Though Norman mostly listened, his very presence cleansed the project of its Schiller-esque checkbook schmutz and won over the straitlaced, wary Mormon Establishment. Schiller would introduce Mailer as “America’s foremost writer, who doesn’t pull any punches. He’s not here to write a book about the Mormon Church. His works have been accepted and are considered to be very, very important views of America, and this event needs the perspective and the understanding of a thinker like Mailer.” Schiller’s new, Old Testament–style beard also helped, reminding everyone that, as a Jew, he was practically a Mormon anyway.
That, plus strategic payoffs (such as the $10,000 in cash Schiller had left on the desk of the prison warden) and endless ingenuity, convinced others to help. Gilmore’s mother, for instance, finally admitted Mailer into her trailer for an interview—but only after Schiller, standing outside during a downpour, presented him not as America’s foremost writer but as Old Man Mailer, desperately needing to pee.
Over time, Mailer actually grew jealous of Schiller. “I was kind of drag-ass … I find conducting interviews very tiring. But he could do three or four a day. And the fact that he was so goddamn fat and could do all this irritated me, so I worked twice as hard.” Whenever Mailer fled east, Larry kept on interviewing, much to Mailer’s annoyance. “He’s screaming at me, ‘I got enough! I got enough! Stop! Stop!,’” Larry remembered. “He was just furious at me! ‘I got enough to write two or three books!’ And I say, ‘No, I don’t have enough to tell the whole story.’”
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
