Mailer

“It is very important to me 

not to be 

sent to some mental institution. 

I’m a sane man. 

If this happens, for the rest of my life, 

My Work will be considered as 

The Work of a man with a disordered mind.”

“Mailer is a Bolinbroker, a born usurper. He will raise an army anywhere, live off the country as best he can, helped by a devoted underground, even assisted at brief moments by rival claimants like myself. Yet when all is said, none of this is the way to live. And it is not a way — at least it makes the way harder — to make a literature, which, no doubt quixotically, remains the interest of each of us. I suppose if it helps Hemingway to think of literature as a Golden Gloves Tournament with himself pounding Maupassant to the mat or fighting Tolstoy to a draw, then no doubt the fantasy has been of some use. But there is also evidence that the preoccupation with Power is a great waste of time. And Mailer has had the honesty to confess that his own competitiveness has wasted him as he worries about reviewers and bad publicity and the seemingly spiteful successes of other novelists…..”

Vidal VS Mailer — A Battle of Wit!

The Dick Cavett Show

The infamous feud between novelist Norman Mailer and writer Gore Vidal comes to a head in a battle of wit, sarcasm, and condescension with the audience and Janet Flanner (reluctantly) in the front row.

Who do you think "won" this clash?

Date aired - December 1st, 1971 - 

Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Janet Flanner

Dick Cavett has been nominated for eleven Emmy awards (the most recent in 2012 for the HBO special, Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again), and won three.  Spanning five decades, Dick Cavett’s television career has defined excellence in the interview format.  He started at ABC in 1968, and also enjoyed success on PBS, USA, and CNBC.

 

His most recent television successes were the September 2014 PBS special, Dick Cavett’s Watergate, followed April 2015 by Dick Cavett’s Vietnam. He has appeared in movies, tv specials, tv commercials, and several Broadway plays. He starred in an off-Broadway production ofHellman v. McCarthy in 2014 and reprised the role at Theatre 40 in LA February 2015.

 

Cavett has published four books beginning with Cavett (1974) and Eye on Cavett (1983), co-authored with Christopher Porterfield.  His two recent books -- Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets (2010) and Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic moments, and Assorted Hijinks(October 2014) are both collections of his online opinion column, written for The New York Times since 2007. Additionally, he has written for The New Yorker, TV Guide, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.

#DickCavett #NormanMailer #GoreVidal #JanetFlanner #WomensLib #Feminism #Writers #NewYork #Awkward #Liberals #Conservatives #TheDickCavettShow

Why Norman Mailer Was So Infuriating

Dick Cavett | Big Think

Why Norman Mailer Was So Infuriating

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The famous clash between the author and Dick Cavett was triggered, in part, by Mailer’s misunderstanding of what an "interview" is supposed to be.

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DICK CAVETT:

Dick Cavett was the host of “The Dick Cavett Show” and the co-author of two books, “Cavett” (1974) and “Eye on Cavett” (1983). He has appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged,” “Into the Woods” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” He currently operates a blog for the “Opinionator” section of the New York Times.  Mr. Cavett lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question : 

How would you prepare for your shows?

Dick Cavett : 

Oh, preparation, well, the Paar Tonight Show sort of set the model for how talk shows worked and they had what would be called the talent coordinator and that person's job was to meet with, if possible, the star or the author, or the historian, or the psychiatrist, or whoever was going to be the guest, and talk to them a little bit, or at least call them on the phone and talk a bit, and just get some stuff down on paper. 

Like, ask him about the fact that 

his daughter just won a prize, 

or he wants you to be sure and mention 

that the Hanseatic League, or -

- I'm sorry, I'm really reaching here -

- but so you've got something for you to look down at, 

and I finally learned that that's great to have, 

but not even that is necessary if things 

roll the way you're supposed to and you have an engaging person, conversation moves as conversation does in real life and you don't necessarily have to look down and read off a note.

Maybe that's why on a notorious show of mine where Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal tried to eviscerate each other, when 

Mailer got pissed, well, he got pissed before he came to the studio, but annoyed at me on the air and I at him, and the thing, I guess, that really got me was when he said, "Why don't you just read the next question off the question sheet?" 

And that's when I said, somewhat famously now, 

"Why don't you fold it five ways and 

put it where the moon don't shine?" 

This got one of the longest laughs in my career 

and certainly in television and it went on from there. 

But the idea that the show was, 

he knew to pick on the thing 

that would anger a host the most, 

that he can't think of anything to say 

and has to read questions off a sheet.

Question: 

What was Norman Mailer like?

Dick Cavett: 

Oh, Norman was many, oh, my God, that woman again. 

Has anything we've done been caught on tape? 

I've had that happen by the way. 

Oh, I like Norman Mailer and 

I loved his writing and long before I knew him 

and he was not gifted in the area of humor,

 thus on that notorious show of mine, Gore Vidal was able to get laughs off of him without -- but Gore wasn't picking on him, he would just say things like, but Norman was pissed, I think drunk is the word I'm looking for, and came on to get even with Gore for something he said Gore had written about him.

But at one point he said, 

"Gore, can't you just talk to me 

instead of talking to the audience? 

Can't you just talk to me?" 

And Gore, in that elegant way that he has, 

said almost the following, 

I'll probably get 80% on it, a wonderful sentence, 

that got applause, it was, approximately, 

"Of course, I'd be happy to talk to you, Norman, 

but we don't find ourselves 

in the friendly neighborhood bar, 

but by election in front of a studio audience 

and it would be dishonest of us 

to pretend otherwise." 

And this great, one of those things, got a big hand, which of course, stung Norman. But he was on a later show, people said, "I bet you never spoke to him again!" 

Yeah, I did, I saw him a number of times after that 

and we remained friends, if not buddies.

Norman Mailer on When He Head-butted Gore Vidal On The Show! | The Dick ...

Dick Cavett welcomes American novelist Norman Mailer to the show where he clarifies his previous arguments with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show and how he head-butted him when in the dressing rooms.

Date aired - September 28th 1972 - 

Norman Mailer and Valerie Harper

For clip licensing opportunities please visit https://www.globalimageworks.com/the-...

Dick Cavett has been nominated for eleven Emmy awards (the most recent in 2012 for the HBO special, Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again), and won three.  Spanning five decades, Dick Cavett’s television career has defined excellence in the interview format.  He started at ABC in 1968, and also enjoyed success on PBS, USA, and CNBC.

 

His most recent television successes were the September 2014 PBS special, Dick Cavett’s Watergate, followed April 2015 by Dick Cavett’s Vietnam. He has appeared in movies, tv specials, tv commercials, and several Broadway plays. He starred in an off-Broadway production ofHellman v. McCarthy in 2014 and reprised the role at Theatre 40 in LA February 2015.

 

Cavett has published four books beginning with Cavett (1974) and Eye on Cavett (1983), co-authored with Christopher Porterfield.  His two recent books -- Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets (2010) and Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic moments, and Assorted Hijinks(October 2014) are both collections of his online opinion column, written for The New York Times since 2007. Additionally, he has written for The New Yorker, TV Guide, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.

#thedickcavettshow #NormanMailer #GoreVidal #ValerieHarper #DickCavett

The Esoteric Kubrick : Arthur Bremer, Mind Control and A Clockwork Orange

Chicago Tribune

August 22nd 1972

"He kept a diary - and prior to that, he had never kept a diary before. It seems to me, that all these so-called political assassins keep diaries."

 

Governor George Wallace on Arthur Bremer

"We know Bremer wasn't a loner - something stinks 

about the whole thing"

 

First Lady Lurmilla Wallace

"Die, Die, Die, RFK Must Die"

 

Sirhan Sirhan's automatic writing

''I will finish what Hinckley started... RR must die... He [John Warnock Hinkley] has told me so in a prophetic dream. Sadly though, your death is also required. You will suffer the same fate as Reagan and others in his fascist regime. 

You cannot escape.

We are a wave of assassins throughout the world.''

Edward M. Richardson,

Letter to Jodie Foster,

April 1981

 George Wallace survived the assassination attempt. He gradually developed the view that one Nixon’s aides ordered the assassination. To gain revenge he announces he is to become a third party candidate. However, Wallace’s health has been severely damaged and reluctantly he had to pull out of the race.

In a comprehensive analysis of Hunt’s work published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, Gore Vidal argued that Hunt might have written the diary that was found in the car of Bremer, the man who attempted to assassinate George Wallace of Alabama.

In May, 1974, Martha Mitchell visited Wallace in Montgomery. She told him that her husband, [Former U.S. Attourney General and CRP  John N. Mitchell, had confessed that Charles Colson had a meeting with Arthur Bremer four days before the assassination attempt.

In his book, The Taking of America, 1-2-3 Richard E. Sprague argued that Donald Segretti and Dennis Cassini, supplied money to Bremer before he attempted to assassinate George Wallace. Others have claimed that Bernard L. Barker, one of the Watergate burglars, was used to pass this money to Bremer. Gore Vidal has also suggested that Bremer's diary was a forgery and had been written by E. Howard Hunt.

Arthur Bremer was released from the Maryland Correctional Institution on 9th November, 2007.

[CTRL] How the US Navy Brain-Trains Political Assassins

 HOW THE US NAVY BRAIN-TRAINS POLITICAL ASSASSINS from The London Times 

The controversy over whether the U.S. Government has ever made use of "political assassinations" seems certain to take a new turn after a remarkable disclosure last week by an officer in the US Navy, In the course of a conversation during a NATO[North Atlantic Treaty Organization]-sponsored conference in Oslo, it was said that the US Navy has been seeking out convicted murderers for retraining in a "political" role. The suggestion was supported by details of this training which, if they are true, might have been taken from the screenplay of Kubrick's film "A Clockwork Orange." 

The details come from Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, a psychologist working at the US Naval hospital in Naples. He was attending a NATO conference held last week in a hotel near Oslo at which about 120 scientists, including five from Britain, exchanged information on psychological research designed to help people in tough jobs�especially soldiers�to cope with stress. 

Dr. Narut's story was later categorically denied-but no explanation was offered why a Navy officer should or could volunteer the detailed descriptions he did. 

The conference heard papers on the effect of battle stress on soldiers in the Yom Kippur War, as well as on the blacking out of supersonic fighter pilots and on the long-term effect of interrogation in enemy hands. 

Dr. Narut's paper appeared to be much the same: the abstract circulated before the meeting was entitled: "The use of symbolic model and verbal intervention in inducting and reducing stress." And in the course of a 110-minute discourse on it he did no more than hint at his work in teaching "combat readiness units" to cope with the stress of killing. It was only under private questioning afterwards with a small group of his listeners, and then later alone with Insight reporter, Peter Watson, that Dr. Narut began to unfold his remarkable story. 

Dr. Narut is in his mid-thirties. He completed a doctoral thesis several years ago on whether certain films could provoke anxiety and whether forcing a man to do tasks irrelevant to the film while watching it might help him cope with such anxiety (a technique described in "Clockwork Orange"). He began his speech to the conference by saying that in the U.S. Navy scientists were well provided with facilities for research. Psychologists, for instance, had access to computerized records, including psychological tests, of large numbers of personnel. 

His naval work involved establishing how to induce servicemen who mar not be naturally inclined to kill, to do so under certain conditions. When pressed afterwards as to what was meant by "combat readiness units," he explained this included men for commando-type operations and-so he said-for insertion into U.S. embassies under cover, ready to kill in those countries should the need arise. Dr. Narut used the word "hitmen" and "assassin" of these men. 

The method, according to Dr. Narut, was to show films specially designed to show people being killed and injured in violent ways. By being acclimated through these films, the men eventually became able to dissociate any feelings from such a situation. 

 

Dr. Narut also added that U.S. Naval psychologists specially selected men for these commando tasks, from submarine crews, paratroops, and some were convicted murderers from military prisons. Asked whether he was suggesting that murderers were being released from prisons to become assassins, he replied: "It's happened more than once." 

 

Another American delegate present in the group, Alfred Zitani, from New Jersey, was sufficiently surprised to remark to Watson: "Do you think Dr. Narut realizes what he has just said? That kind of information must be classified." 

Later in private conversation with Watson, Dr. Narut described the training in which he had been involved. It had, he said, been in three phases: 

Selection: 

Research on those given awards for valour in battle has shown, said Narut, that the best killers are men with "passive aggressive" personalities. They are people with a lot of drive-though they are well-disciplined and do not appear nervous who periodically experience bursts of explosive energy when they can literally kill without remorse. Dr. Narut says he and his colleagues have, therefore, been looking for men who have either shown themselves capable of killing in this premeditated way (in Vietnam perhaps, or in a murder in the barracks) or whom the Navy's test show as potentially capable of it. 

Among the tests used is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. This consists of hundreds of questions, and rates personality on many traits including such things as hostility, depression, psychopathy. Also used is the famous inkblot test in which the subject describes in detail what the various inkblots make him think of. Dr. Narut said that on this test he looks for men who respond at the extremes to the coloured cards rather than purely black and white. In clinical terms this is generally accepted as indicating that a patient is violent, The patient who responds excessively to the black and white cards is often regarded as a depressive. 

Stress reduction training: 

The men selected are brought either to the Navy's neuropsychiatric laboratory in San Diego, California (which also trains spies in techniques to counter interrogation), or to the laboratory where Narut works in the U.S. Naval Medical Center in Naples. They are first taught to shoot, and then the "Clockwork Orange" training begins in earnest, to rid them of any qualms they may have about killing. 

According to Dr. Narut, men are shown a series of special films "to heighten their dissociative powers with regard to killing." The films are gruesome and as the training proceeds they get progressively more horrific. Even so the trainee is forced to watch. His head is bolted into a clamp so that he cannot turn away and a special mechanism ensures that he cannot close his eyelids. 

Dr. Narut said that one of the first films a trainee sees is a brutal, blow- by-blow account of an African youth being crudely circumcised by fellow members of his tribe. No anaesthetic is used and the knife is obviously blunt (this film in fact is one regularly used in psychological experiments "to create experimental stress"). 

When the film is over the trainee is asked such questions as, "What color was the belt on the doctor's trousers?" or "What was the motif on the handle of the knife with which the circumcision was made?" 

>From here the trainees proceed to films with people from a little nearer home. In one the camera follows the movements of a man at work in a saw mill, slicing planks of wood along their length. The film shows his thrusting movements, back and forth until suddenly he slips-and cuts his finger off. 

In this way, said Dr. Narut, many of the trainees learn how to cope with even the most gruesome scenes with complete detachment. If physiological measures- like heart and breathing rate-which respond dramatically during the early films, calm down and resume their normal patterns as more bloodthirsty scenes are shown, the men are judged to have completed this stage. Many do not adjust, said Dr. Narut; presumably they are "failed." 

Dehumanization of The Enemy: 

In this last phase, the idea is to get the men to think of the potential enemies they will have to face as inferior forms of human life. They get lectures and films now which portray personalities and customs in foreign countries whose interests may go against the US. But the films and lectures are specially biased to present the "enemy" as less than human: the stupidity of local customs is ridiculed, local personalities may be presented as evil demigods rather than legitimate political figures. 

The process, according to Dr. Narut, takes a few weeks and the men are passed on. He refused to say where the men went, arguing that he did not have the necessary security clearance. However, at one point in our conversation he used the Athens Embassy as an example and he also said that his busiest time, when the largest batch of men went through this training, was towards the end of 1973, at the time of the Yom Kippur War. 

Since our reporter returned from Oslo on Thursday, Dr. Narut has not been either at his home or his laboratory in Naples to comment on the issues raised by the disclosures. 

When we gave the details to the US Embassy in London, they referred us to the U.S. Navy office here.

The Pentagon in Washington last night denied categorically that the US Navy had ever "engaged in psychological training or other types of training of personnel assassins." They also denied that any such training had ever taken place either in San Diego or in Naples. They had been unable to contact Lt. Commander Narut. All they were able to confirm was that he was indeed on the staff of the Navy Regional Medical Center in Naples as a psychologist. 

- Yipster Times Feb. '76 

pp.83-84