A Shaky Start
Time's mocking report on Mailer's drunken master-of-ceremonies performance at Washington's Ambassador Theater on the eve of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon — the episode he would transform into Book One of The Armies of the Night. An about-Mailer article; full text held (rights pending).
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“A Shaky Start.” Time, 27 October 1967.
A derisive Time report on Mailer’s turn as master of ceremonies at Washington’s Ambassador Theater on the eve of the March on the Pentagon — “slurping liquor from a coffee mug,” trading obscenities with hecklers, and introducing Dwight Macdonald and Robert Lowell before getting himself arrested at the Pentagon. The drunken evening Time ridicules here is the same one Mailer would reframe, from the inside, as Book One of The Armies of the Night (1968) — making the article a useful hostile counterpoint to his own account. Full text on the full-text page (rights pending).