1993
In February Mailer conceives and directs an all-star staged reading of Shaw's 'Don Juan in Hell' at Carnegie Hall — playing the Commander opposite Gore Vidal's Devil, Susan Sontag, and Gay Talese. In the summer he shows his line drawings in Provincetown and quarrels publicly with Picasso's biographer John Richardson over his own forthcoming Picasso book, while beginning research on a book about Lee Harvey Oswald. He writes a boxing essay on Ryan O'Neal and keynotes a Dallas assassination symposium.
February — Don Juan in Hell
On 15 February Mailer conceived and directed a one-time, all-star staged reading of “Don Juan in Hell” — the third-act interlude of Shaw’s Man and Superman — at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, as a benefit for the Actors Studio (93.1, 93.2). Standing in for the ill Kurt Vonnegut, Mailer played the Commander, with Gore Vidal as the Devil, Susan Sontag as Doña Ana, and Gay Talese as Don Juan — an homage to the famous 1951 Carnegie reading. Vidal: “I’ll take Norman’s compliment; I’ll play the Devil.”
Summer — Picasso, drawings, and Oswald
In July Mailer exhibited his line drawings at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown — a fundraiser for the Fine Arts Work Center — disclaiming much talent but “plenty of flair” (93.3, 93.4). The drawings grew out of his completed but unpublished book on the young Picasso (95.38, then titled “Pablo and Fernande: A Portrait of Picasso as a Young Artist”). That book set off a public quarrel with Picasso’s authorized biographer John Richardson, who refused to let Mailer quote his work and called Mailer’s a “scissors-and-paste job” (93.2a, 93.5); Mailer moved the book to another publisher to resolve it. He was also at work on “a nonfiction book about Lee Harvey Oswald in the Soviet Union” — the future Oswald’s Tale (95.16).
Fall — boxing, fashion, and Dallas
In October Esquire ran “The Best Move Lies Very Close to the Worst” (93.6), Mailer’s essay on boxing and Ryan O’Neal. In late November he had keynoted the Third Assassination Symposium on John F. Kennedy in Dallas (reported in December, 93.8). He contributed to a New York Times Magazine fashion symposium (93.7), a foreword to Joel Meyerowitz‘s Bay/Sky (93.8a), and a letter to Salman Rushdie for The Rushdie Letters (93.9). Paul Krassner’s memoir Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut (93.8b) recounted their counterculture-era meetings.
Related pages
- 1992 | 1994
- “The Best Move Lies Very Close to the Worst” | John Richardson | Gore Vidal
- Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography (95.38) | Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (95.16)