Was Mailer’s Mayoral Bid a Case of Vidal Envy?
The accepted narrative of how Norman Mailer arrived at the decision to run for mayor of New York City in 1960 goes like this:
In July 1960, on assignment for Esquire, Mailer covers the Democratic National Convention: the resulting long article about nominee John F. Kennedy, “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” is hailed as a vanguard piece of journalism. The Kennedys, sufficiently pleased with the profile, invite Mailer to the family compound in Hyannis.
This firsthand exposure to the Kennedy charisma and the promise of the New Frontier inspires Mailer to pursue elected office.
That narrative certainly makes sense, but it may be incomplete.
It’s more than likely — in spite of the fact that none of the five Mailer biographies so much as suggest this — that Mailer was also motivated by rival author Gore Vidal, who in 1960 was running as the Democratic candidate for Congress in the 29th Congressional District of New York State.
In 1960, it was good to be Gore.
Starting in February, Paramount Pictures releases Visitor to a Small Planet, a Jerry Lewis comedy based on a teleplay of the same name, which Gore had written. (Visitor had also run on Broadway, in 1957, earning a Tony nomination for its star, Cyril Ritchard.) The following month, Gore’s play about presidential politics, The Best Man, premieres on Broadway and is subsequently nominated for six Tony Awards.
Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan writes that contemporaneous with the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, candidate Gore is “hosting for his state’s delegation a celebrity-studded Hollywood party at Romanoff’s restaurant.”
Kaplan puts Mailer at the bar, “drinking heavily and glowering,” telling Vidal: “I hate you. You’re too successful.”
Surely it wasn’t only success: Mailer was writing about the Kennedys, but Gore had been cozy with them for years. Mailer could call Jack Kennedy “Superman,” but Gore could call Jack on the phone and get through.
Gore had something of an advantage, of course, insofar Jacqueline Kennedy was his stepsister.
Gore also had something Mailer didn’t have: a family legacy and connections in the nation’s capital. Gore’s campaign had the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, who, years earlier, had received fragments of a Mailer essay-in-progress positing that U.S. Southern racism was based on white jealousy of the Negro’s storied sexual potency. Roosevelt correctly identified Mailer’s notion as “horrible and unnecessary.”
To look at photos of Gore and JFK together on the campaign trail is to see two men who could have been pals at Choate. Gore, like Jack, was six foot tall in dress shoes, slender, photogenic, informed, and well spoken.
Mailer, meanwhile — short, paunchy, with big ears — had spent the 1950s abusing alcohol and marijuana, and pursuant to the critical and commercial failures of his most recent novels, he was struggling to find his way, both in letters and in life.
We like to think of creative people as being inspired by their contemporaries, as paying homage to each other, or stealing ideas only to take that idea in a new and exciting direction.
We don’t like to think of them as copycats.
As fine of a writer as Mailer could be, there’s an undeniable streak of the copycat in his career — unless you think we would have had The Executioner’s Song had not it been for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
Or if we would have had 1973’s Marilyn: A Biography — originally, short prose pieces accompanying a book of celebrity photographs — if it hadn’t been for Capote’s 1959 book Observations with Richard Avedon, short prose pieces accompanying a book of celebrity photographs.
Or if Mailer would have tried so hard to adapt his novel The Deer Park into a play if both Vidal and Capote had not already successfully written plays that opened on Broadway.
There are, however, key differences between Mailer’s 1960 bid for mayor of New York City and Vidal’s 1960 bid for Congress.
Gore was nominated by committee to be the Democratic candidate for the 29th Congressional District; Mailer planned to run for mayor of New York City on “the existential ticket,” an invention of his own mind.
Gore, making campaign appearances, spoke about national issues such as defense and education, as well as issues relevant to the 29th District’s population of dairy farmers; Mailer wanted to launch his campaign for mayor with a salutatory open letter to Fidel Castro.
And of course, Gore lost his bid for Congress in 1960, although he did garner a respectable percentage of the vote in what was then a traditionally Republican district.
Mailer, meanwhile, threw himself a cocktail party to declare his candidacy for mayor and punctuated the event by stabbing his wife.
If Mailer had done one fundamental thing wrong, it’s that he didn’t copy Gore Vidal closely enough.
Tim Lemire is an author based in Providence, RI. He is working on a book about Norman Mailer.
