“Mailer burned a hole in the ground with every book and sometimes it happened to be the ground beneath his feet.” -- Burn a hole all the way to China, step out with a carnation in lapel, walk to the moon, etc. Mailer beat the shit out of Rip Torn in a scene in a bar in a bed and breakfast I was staying in in Bridgehampton, I think, and I remember Rip Torn wasn’t really fighting back. Torn was an actor and actor’s don’t fight for real like writers do, for blood, and I think Torn was shocked that Norman kept punching him. Now I’ve just read there was a violent scene in MAIDSTONE where Torn came after Mailer with a hammer or something later in a field, not a hotel, and I guess Torn got his revenge, and it helped make the movie, apparently, I never saw it, long novelistic movies are worse than…anyhow Gotta add that me and Norman are among the few novelists every to direct our own books as films, mine one and only novel AREN’T YOU EVEN GONNA KISS ME GOODBYE starred River Phoenix, who lived more like a poet than an actor, which is why he died for real and lives on for real, unlike most actors, who constantly may die on screen but often don’t live much for real -- my unreflective opinion at this instant -- but this is a terrific article about writers. I know from conversations with Hemingway’s last wife and his best friend that “Ernest” wanted to die after his favorite actor Gary Cooper died, making his first attempt trying to decapitate himself in front of a small airplane’s propeller. “Then Ernest blew his brains out on poor Mary’s front porch,” my friend Jimmy Sheean told me with a chortle. Don’t blame him, meeting Mary. Jimmy adored Ernest, but Ernest tried to kill him once by telling him a wrong direction to the “FRONT” during the WWII journalists’ fight for exclusives, another long story; maybe a movie, probably not, too long.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 17:05:21 +0000