Norman Mailer and Norris Church
There came a time when Savvy mgazine and I reached an amicable parting of the ways. After four-plus years of catering to executive women, after lurching my way up the masthead from copy editor to executive editor, I was burned out. I wanted to try my hand at writing for other magazines (I don’t think I had any desire at that point to get back to fiction). And the magazine was in the process of being sold to Meredith, publisher of the Ladies Home Journal, which like more and more “books” pitched to women had finally caught on that much of the female population was working outside the home.
And Mr. Landi was making enough that my income was not really critical to our survival.
We had a perfectly nice guest room/study with a sofa bed in our Brooklyn Heights apartment, but I decided to convert a large walk-in closet off the living-room into a windowless writer’s lair. Lined with shelves for books, it felt cozy and private, sealed off from distractions.
We had just entered the dawn of personal computing and in an act of good faith that this was the future, we plunked down about $1200 on a Leading Edge Model D, an IBM clone from the mid-1980s with floppy drives and 256KB of RAM, whatever the hell that was. It had a greenish-black screen and blazing orange type and a manual that seemed to have been translated from Korean. I spent hours trying to figure out how to make a simple document, until something clicked and the paragraphs began to stack up in a recognizable, coherent fashion. Nonetheless for months I continued to compose on my Selectric in the guest room, then transfer the copy to the box in my tiny sanctum sanctorum.
I’ve heard of stranger writing habits.
Within a short time I was writing for a grab-bag of publications: humor pieces for GQ and Travel&Leisure, soft reportage for Psychology Today and Glamour, even a story for Cosmopolitan on whether men were hornier when they were gainfully employed (I used friends as sources), which for reasons now obscure to me was killed.
It was not a great living, nor was it particularly focused, but it was gratifying to see my name so often in print.
Especially since right next door to us resided a real writer, none other than Norman Mailer, who owned the townhouse adjacent to our building and lived there with his fifth wife, Norris Church, and their son and assorted other offspring. To my great embarrassment, I have never read much of Mailer and knew him only from his rambunctious reputation as the man who once debated uber feminist Germaine Greer, one of my heroines since college, and stabbed one wife with a penknife (and defended a murderer who went on to kill again after writing a best-selling memoir endorsed by Mailer). So I was not inclined to like him when I passed him on the street, and generally lowered my eyes if he went trundling past. At this point, in the mid-1980s, he was a scowling Teddy Bear of a guy, bandy-legged, with a full head of iron gray curls. I never dared speak to or greet him, but when my parents were visiting one weekend, probably en route from Florida to Montauk, my mother was sitting on the front stoop, reading the Times, when the literary lion sauntered past. “Good morning, Mr. Mailer,” she chirped, “and how are you today?”
“Very well, Madam, and good morning to you too!”
She was thrilled to pieces for weeks.
Mailer’s last wife was something else: a flame-haired knockout, almost a head taller than her husband, she hailed from poverty in rural Arkansas and was often described as “Norman’s Marilyn” (it was at a book signing for his reflections on MM that they met).
I sometimes spied her in the local supermarket, a beacon of glamour among the dowdy neighborhood shoppers. One winter night, waiting on our front steps for the Brooklyn Heights car service, sure that the car dispatched was about to stop for me, I spied Norris pop out from her doorway, swaddled in sable, no doubt on her way to a glittering party in Manhattan. I was clearly outranked.
And yet reading her obituary from 2010 I now wonder if we might have become pals. She was a talented painter with nine one-woman shows to her credit, and long after our time in the Heights, she published two novels. We might have commiserated over Norman’s infidelities or talked about her youthful fling with Bill Clinton. She could have given me some hair and make-up tips. But she seemed far too remote and otherworldly ever to have taken note of the likes of me.
About two years into my scattershot freelance career, I decided I was not being serious enough and needed to go back to school, to embark on and finish a PhD in art history. The City University of New York grad-school center on West 42nd Street had a great reputation, and was eminently affordable. After excavating my transcripts and soliciting a couple of recommendations from former professors, I was back in the club. If I could not resuscitate the friendships and camaraderie of Columbia circa 1975, I could perhaps resurrect some of the intellectual zeal with which I pursued my studies a decade earlier.
Fat chance. Too many years in so-called journalism had spoiled me for the rigors of trying to decipher critics I once held in high esteem, like Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried, and it seemed to me a whole new language had evolved in the decade that I was away from academe, one that was maddeningly abstruse and privileged only a special few who were in on the secret code. I thoroughly enjoyed the lectures of famed feminist art historian Linda Nochlin (less so those of a thoroughly disorganized lecturer in mid-century Modernism), but when it came time to do the reading and, especially, hand in papers, I balked. You mean, you want me to write something but you’re not going to pay me?
At the same time I had accepted a job working part time as an editor and writer for a hot young magazine called Manhattan, inc., a publication that covered the glitzy world of robber barons in mid-1980s New York. It was founded by an ambitious editor named Jane Amsterdam and quicky went on to earn a National Magazine Award, but she left in a scuffle over “editorial integrity” and was replaced by Clay Felker, father of the New Journalism and founder of New York magazine. Felker was by then in his semi-coherent twilight years and required regular naps, but I got a bit of a chance to cover some interesting players in the Manhattan art world: ad man and collector George Lois, an obnoxious but uncannily prescient art adviser name Estelle Schwartz, notable art in Manhattan’s upscale restaurants (the Four Seasons, Le Bernardin, etc), and my favorite, an analysis of current over-the-top fashion trends called “Bimbo Chic,” an assignment Felker wanted to hand over to his mistress until I hotly insisted I’d done a damn good job and deserved to be published.
It was, in retrospect, a fun beat, because the magazine allowed me to write in a punchy smart-ass voice, and I could perhaps have parlayed the post into a better-paying editorial job at someplace like Vanity Fair. But, to my everlasting regret, I decided to move to Boston with Mr. Landi. And that opened a whole ‘nother chapter.
Healthy Stir Fry Sauce
I am not going to gripe about it anymore, but I am still struggling with Covid, and making all sorts of changes to my diet, largely to eliminate sugar, preservatives, white flour, and other bad stuff. My favorite lonely-girl meals are often stir frys—meat, chicken, tofu, veggies—with bottled sauces heavy on unpronounceable preservatives, and so I found a healthier alternative online. You can use it with any number of ingredients: quickly cook your protein at a high temp in canola or grapeseed oil, set aside, and then fry vegetables in another tablespoon or so of oil, timing in phases according to whether they are hardy (like broccoli or carrots) or tender (snow peas, mushrooms, bean sprouts). Cook to the desired degree of doneness and then add the sauce (adapted from fromscratchfast.com).
Ingredients
o ¼ cup low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
o 2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce or tamari
o 2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
o 1 tablespoon honey
o 2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil
o 2 teaspoons Sriracha or chili sauce
o 1 teaspoon rice vinegar
o ½ teaspoon fish sauce (optional)
o 1 tablespoon cornstarch
o 1 garlic clove, grated
o 1 teaspoon grated ginger
Instructions
In small bowl or jar, whisk or shake everything together until the honey and cornstarch are dissolved. The sauce is ready to go, but be sure to whisk or shake it again before using, as the cornstarch will settle at the bottom.
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