Norman Mailer looks tremendous in San Francisco in April 1987, even if he reports an arthritic ache in one knee that he knows will never go away. He is a shining gray 64, and he is having a terrific time finishing off his new movie, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which he wrote and directed from his own novel. He says making it has been the happiest experience of his life, and he is so innocently tranquil that he’s looking foward to going to the Cannes Film Festival (an ordeal for most people), where Tough Guys will meet its first audience and Mailer will sit on the jury.
But the question doesn’t go away: not, what are you doing in San Francisco, but, what are you doing in movies, in their whirl of dreadful, diverting company? Why aren’t you staying lonely? It is a question that was first asked by Marlon Brando in Los Angeles in the latter months of 1949. Hot off the success of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer was on the coast, writing a screenplay, hobnobbing and, with that immense, brandished idealism of self he was, “trying to sell my soul, because I might have a chance to lay a movie star.”